


Nightshade

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Clubbing, Date Rape Drug/Roofies, M/M, Meet-Cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 06:22:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18632593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Rescuing a gorgeous blond who just got roofied in a crappy club is not exactly the meet-cute Roy imagined, but an adage about beggars and selection comes to mind.





	Nightshade

**Author's Note:**

> Back in early March, I was thinking sort of amusedly about how I wrote SO MANY club fics back in the Death Note days, but I'd never written one for FMA. And about how that's probably a good thing. And then I ended up listening to "Just Dance", and the rest is…………………… exactly what you would expect, honestly. Hey, 2009, how you been?
> 
> Funny enough, I knew I was writing an antidote to the last fic to a certain extent, but it wasn't until I was most of the way through that I realized just how thematically opposite it was. So enjoy the _other_ type of amnesia fic, I guess! XD
> 
>  **Big content warning for this one:** like it says on the tin, Ed gets drugged without his knowledge, and slightly messy awareness/consent issues accompany that. It's a pretty lighthearted fic otherwise, but if that could be a sensitive topic for you, you might want to skip this one. ♥ Feel free to drop me a line if you need a more detailed description before you decide. ♥ Emetophobia warning on this one, too, for the record!
> 
> I also think it may be useful to note that Ed's opinions on Apple Watches do not necessarily reflect the views of the author. (Translation: please don't @ me, omg)

“I’m glad you’re here,” Roy says.

Riza gives him a well-practiced withering look.  “So that you can drink yourself stupid and hit on twenty-year-olds?”

“I thought that went without saying,” Roy says.  “But also because Jean is _much_ less likely to get wasted and do something that none of us can stop and all of us regret if he knows that you’re here.”  He crosses his legs and grins at her.  “More importantly—my _word_ , are you suggesting that this upstanding establishment would accept fake IDs in the name of business?  What a heinous accusation.”

“I’ve always hoped that Jean knows that I’d sell him for a corn chip,” Riza says, about as dryly as the type of drinks that Roy has given up pretending that he likes.  “Good to know he’s caught up.  If he does anything _really_ questionable, I’m sending Becca pictures.”  She sips her virgin cocktail demurely.  “I saw at least one fake at the bar.  Keep in mind, though, that if you go down there and start ruining anybody’s fun, they’ll probably blacklist you instead of the dastardly teenaged culprit.”

“Virtue is so rarely rewarded,” Roy says.  “I think Shakespeare wrote that.”

“Definitely not,” Riza says.  “But I imagine he would greatly enjoy all of the wrongful attributions he’s accumulated over the years, so he might as well have.”

“That almost sounded like you were on my side for a second,” Roy says.

“When was the last time you went to the doctor?” she asks.  “You know, to get your ears checked.”

He laughs, but she’s still grimacing.

“What?” he says.  “Do you want me to make you a drink?  I’d do better.”

“I know you would,” she says.  “It’s not that.  Just—it’s… isn’t it a pretty tragic reflection on the two of us that _Jean_ is the one getting married?  You and I are both significantly more intelligent and significantly more attractive, but…”

“He’s emotionally intelligent,” Roy says, and then his conscience compels him to qualify with, “in a very… weird sort of way.  And have you see him with his shirt off?”

“No,” Riza says, “and no, thank you.”

“Suit yourself,” Roy says.

“The fact remains,” she says, tilting the rim of her glass just enough to seem like she’s pointing it at him, “that he’s the one getting married despite being the kind of man who thinks that the world’s best bachelor party idea is going clubbing _in our own precinct_.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” Roy says.  “At least it’s cheaper than Vegas.”

“Glory hallelujah,” Riza says.  “Christmas is saved.”

“Cheer up,” Roy says.

“Easy for you to say on your second cocktail,” Riza says.

“I know,” Roy says.  “But it’s good, isn’t it?  I’ve been meaning to have a night out for a while.”

Riza has her straw in her mouth again, which does not impede her in the slightest from saying, “Liar.”

“Fine,” Roy says.  “Guilty.  But I _am_ glad about it now that we’re actually here.”

She eyes him, but she knows him well enough to realize that this one’s mostly true, so she can’t reiterate the accusation.

“There comes a point in your adulthood,” he says, “where you have to come to terms with the fact that having the entire HGTV programming schedule memorized has not fulfilled your inner life nearly as much as you hoped it would when you paid for the cable package.”

“Poetry,” Riza says.  “In addition to which, I think I just answered my own question about why we’re so terminally single.”  She swills her drink thoughtfully.  “They should let you buy individual channels for the people like us who only ever watch one.”

“We watched the Westminster Dog Show that one time,” Roy says.

“Which we could have watched online,” Riza says.

“Hayate wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much,” Roy says.

“Good point,” Riza says.  “Heaven forbid I don’t pay an exorbitant fee for a cable package I use less than two percent of, since it might someday matter to my _dog_.”

Roy feels extremely affronted on Hayate’s behalf, which probably means the cocktails are kicking in.  “Hey.  He’s a _very_ good dog.”

“He doesn’t watch television,” Riza says.  “He has zero favorite shows.  We’re too old for this clubbing thing, Roy.”

“Speak for yourself,” Roy says.

“We’re the same age,” she says.

“Apparently not on the inside,” Roy says.

“I’m cutting you off,” Riza says.

“Don’t be like that,” Roy says.  “Jean’s paying.”

“All the more reason,” Riza says.  “When he and Becca merge bank accounts, and you’ve put sixteen fizzy vodka drinks on his credit card, who do you think is going to be held responsible?”

“Me,” Roy says.  “Although they’re not especially fizzy.  That bartender doesn’t really know what he’s doing.”

“Do any of us?” Riza says.  She stands up and crosses over to the edge of the balcony.  “Speaking of which, have you put eyes on Jean in the last ten minutes or so?”

“Not really,” Roy says.  “I’ve been too busy defending all of my poor life choices from your scathing commentary.”

“We both know that your life would be excruciatingly dull without it,” she says, which is, unfortunately, true.  “Come here and help me look.  Why don’t they do neon hats for bachelor parties?”

“We should put him on a leash next time,” Roy says.  At her Look, he waves the hand not bearing the remnants of his cocktail.  “Next time out!  Not next marriage.  There won’t be a next marriage, because if he tries that, we’ll both kill him.”

That ameliorates the Look enough that he can relax a little and start scanning the crowd on the dance floor below.

“What was he wearing?” he asks.  “Denim jacket?”

“Probably,” Riza says.  “I guess it might as well be the nineties if we’re all going to act like children.”

“Do you have a migraine?” Roy asks.

“Yes,” Riza says.  “A fledgling, at the moment, but I expect great things.  It’s the bass on this music that all the kids are listening to these days, you see.”

“Tragic,” Roy says.

“I don’t see him,” Riza says.

“Strange,” Roy says, scanning the seething masses for misguided uses of denim.  “He’s the worst dancer I’ve ever met.  Usually there’s a radius around him of people who don’t want to get close in case it’s contagious.”

“Or you can find him by Heymans filming blackmail video,” Riza says.

“Very true,” Roy says.  He tries to pick out a familiar silhouette—sometimes shapes or movement are easier to identify than details—but there are so many lights, and so many twisting bodies, and so many gleams of silver studs and swathes of glitter.  “Damn.  I don’t see him either.”

“Hmm,” Riza says.

There’s something… significant… in the sound.

He looks at her.  “‘Hmm’ what?”

Riza points downward.  Roy attempts to follow the direction of her finger, squints, squints harder, discovers that it’s absolutely fruitless, and looks at her expectantly instead.

“ _There_ ,” she says, which helps not at all.  “Your type.”

“Excuse me,” Roy says.  “I am a deeply complicated, richly-layered, and highly individual human being.  I contain multitudes.  I do not have a _‘type’_ , which furthermore is such a reductive understanding of attraction th—oh, my God, I see him.”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say any of the hilarious things you just said,” Riza says.

“Bless you,” Roy says.  “Oh, my _God_.  That’s—that’s not even a _shirt_.”

“I think that depends on your definition,” Riza says.  “It has… a sleeve.”

It does.

That’s about all that it has, because the rest of the garment—if it can be called as much—appears to be made of mesh.  The mostly-opaque black fabric of the right sleeve seems to extend across the chest enough to pretend to hide the pectorals, but the leather pants are slung so low that it’s all for show in multiple senses of the phrase.  A long blond whip of a ponytail makes for a nice finishing touch to flip Roy’s stomach over and twist it into a warming, pulsing knot.  The ass is a twelve on a ten-scale; the hair is a thirteen; and the way he moves his hips is _criminal_.

Maybe he’s not cute.  Maybe the body’s a knockout, but he has mean eyes, or a sour scowl, or…

He tips his head back, turning on one heel, hips swinging, hair dancing—

Goddamnit all to hell and back, and then to a deeper circle the second time.

“I’m too old for this,” Roy says.

“Are you sure?” Riza asks.  “Or—perhaps a better question—is it more entertaining than standing here trying to pick Jean’s bad fashion choices out of the crowd?”

“Everyone in this entire room,” Roy says, “who is single and inclined towards men is going to try to hit that.  And several who aren’t either one, most likely.  The last thing I need to do is be one more person treating him like a piece of meat when the whole world’s acting like butchers, and he’s just trying to have some fun.”

“You’re fun,” Riza says.  While Roy is reeling from the way that the planet just dropped off of its axis and wheeled off into the relentless void of space, she says, “You can just _dance_ with him.  If he likes you, you’ll know.”

“I don’t know,” Roy says.  He realizes, too late, that his traitor of a hand has clenched his fingers around the railing.  He tries to relax, but Riza will have already seen it.  “It’s not a big deal.”

“Of course not,” Riza says.  “You’re fine.  You’re happy.  You can’t think of anything you’d love more than to spend every night with a Property Brothers marathon for the rest of your natural life.  Besides, you’re too old and decrepit to take chances and enjoy yourself the _one_ time someone drags the both of us out of our little caves and tries to force us to have fun.”

Roy grimaces.  “It’s so painful when you equivocate instead of telling me what you really think.  Why don’t you just give it to me straight next time?”

“You don’t want it straight,” Riza says.  “Which is why you’d better get down there.”

It feels like Roy’s soul is teetering back and forth on the fulcrum of a grand decision, which is probably also the cocktails talking.  “I—but what if—”

“Roy,” she says.  “You have a great job.  You’re a smooth talker.  You’re _remarkably_ good-looking for your age.”

“Ow,” Roy says.

“You’re welcome,” she says.  “Get your ass down there.”

“He’s out of my league,” Roy says, and even he can hear the streak of melodramatically pronounced regret coloring his voice.  “If we’re even playing the same sport, which is so often not a guarantee, and… look, he already has a new friend.”

He may be pushing the word right up to the limits of its linguistic elasticity, given that he’s referring to a man who just sidled through the crowd to get close to the knockout no-shirt blond in a way that looks somewhat more predatory than amicable.

Riza saw it, too.  “I don’t know about that.”

“I live in hope,” Roy says.

“You live in bullshit,” Riza says.

Roy should probably stop gazing rapturously at the idol of his heart and the owner of his affections, who very well may have a terrible attitude and a worse personality.  “That, too.”

Unfortunately for all of the things Roy lives in, the newcomer—tallish; dark hair; goatee; T-shirt that might be olive green, although it’s nearly impossible to tell with the way the lights flick back and forth—dances over into the blond’s proximity and hovers there in a way that makes Roy’s instincts prickle.  The blond, who has, by the looks of it, long since migrated off to his own little world, doesn’t even take notice until the man reaches out and slings an arm around his waist, drawing them tightly together.

Roy’s heart just leapt into his throat, which is nice and dramatic and wheezy and _awful_.

The sudden, swelling pain of it makes him blink hard, though, and in that brief interval, he misses the first instant of the confrontation.  By the second, the interloper has started stumbling backwards, because the blond has rewarded the unwarranted aggression with an _extremely_ meaningful shove.  Several other people on the dance floor are turning and shying away, now, and the blond is waving his left arm and probably shouting something, and Roy’s knuckles seem to have affixed themselves semi-permanently to the railing.

“Whoa,” Roy says.

“Get down there,” Riza says.

“You and I both remember what happened last time I tried to do the knight-in-shining-armor bit,” Roy says.  “He can handle himself.  He’s fine.”

“Then just go down there and tell him that,” Riza says.  “Maybe start with the ‘fine’ part.  I don’t know.  Men make no sense.”

“I wish I could argue with that,” Roy says, “but my track record is… not going to back me up.”

“Definitely not,” Riza says.

“Can we talk about you?” Roy asks, knowing that he’s grasping at teflon straws.  “It’s not as though you’ve had—”

“Also a ‘definitely not’,” Riza says.  “Hey.  Keep an eye on your boy.”

“He is not,” Roy says, “ _my_ —oh, dear.”

The boy in question, who is not Roy’s, who has nothing to do with Roy, who owes Roy absolutely nothing up to and including the time of day, has somehow acquired a drink.  He has, even less explicably, elected to continue dancing with said drink in hand.

“What’s he drinking?” Riza asks.  “You can go buy him another one.”

“He’s already had too many,” Roy says.  That much he can tell from this distance; identifying the mixer is proving to be a bit more of a challenge, given that Gorgeous McGreatHair hasn’t stopped twirling long enough for Roy to make out much more than a very Caribbean-looking turquoise-blue.

“Then you can go buy him a mocktail version and pretend it’s the real thing,” Riza says.

“Why are you trying to get rid of me?” Roy asks.

“If we’re both stuck here,” Riza says, “one of us should at least be having fun.  What am I supposed to tell Becca tomorrow?  ‘Yeah, we all went out, we lost Jean in the first five minutes even though he was wearing his literal-jean jacket—I know, we need to burn it—so Roy and I just sat around on the upper level of a club for kids and bitched about life and the universe for three solid hours.’”

“You just described the perfect evening out,” Roy says.

“Roy,” she says.  “Go enjoy yourself.  Your whole _thing_ used to be the thrill of the chase.”

“While being fastidiously respectful of boundaries,” Roy says.

“Mostly,” Riza says.

“ _Always_ ,” Roy says, and he ninety-five percent believes it.  He did know that much, even in the olden days, when the world was new, and his back hurt significantly less, and the headaches hadn’t started yet, and he slept better, and he could keep a running tally of the white hairs because there were few enough of them to _count_.  “But that’s irrelevant, because you correctly used the past tense, and things… are different now.”

He doesn’t have to mention why—she knows.  She had to help pick up the pieces, which he will regret as long as he lives.  He shouldn’t have put that on her—shouldn’t even have shown her the dank and dripping interior of the cavern of his weakness; shouldn’t have ever let her help him shore up the walls of the mine.  He should have pushed her away and handled it.  He should have kept it together by force of will and steamrolled through it.  He should have become the kind of person he’s always wanted to be.

But losing Maes was—

More than he’d counted on.  More than he’d ever imagined.  More, and deeper, and worse.  He’ll never know if he would have survived without her; he just knows that _everything_ was changed the next day.  The next minute, really—the next breath.  On one side of that knife’s edge, the world had made sense; on the other—

On the other was a cliff, and he was well over it and a long damn way down before she started throwing him ropes.

He knows it’s pointless, but he’s tried to live a life that Maes would be marginally prouder of since he started to cobble things back together.  It seemed like the best way to preserve the memory of the man and pay some homage to the impact of his being, and his giving, and his passing.

 _Passing_ is the wrong word, though.  People _pass_ in their sleep—pass away, fade away; dwindle and are gone.  _Passing_ is passive.  Maes was never passive for a single, solitary moment of his life, up to and including the one he died in.  He went out fighting, and bleeding, and utterly, irrevocably real.

The man Roy was five years ago would have been on that dance floor mere minutes after they arrived, and by now he would have canvassed it and locked his targets and worked them individually until he’d decided which one was likeliest to offer the most satisfying combination of excitement and evanescence.

Tonight’s Roy is just… tired.  Tonight’s Roy is making a mental catalogue of all of the other things that he could buy with the eight or nine or eleven dollars that a drink costs here, depending on what’s in it and whether the bartender likes the look of you or not.  Elicia’s in a colorful sock phase.  You can get _excellent_ pairs of socks for eleven bucks.

You can also, presumably, get a tropical-water-turquoise drink in a tall glass, and if you’ve earned the nickname Gorgeous in other people’s heads, you can apparently swan around with it for ages without spilling—and without drinking particularly much of it.  Maybe the sin-clad dynamo drawing Roy’s eyes right to him knows that he’s starting to teeter towards _too far gone_.

Maybe he’s already tumbling.

As evidence: he doesn’t seem to notice the man with the goatee slipping through the crowd towards him again.  He has his back turned, and his glass raised; his hips shift, but his hand doesn’t, and the stranger reaches up towards his glass, and—

“No,” Roy says, feeling his spine straighten itself out from where he’s been slouching as he really started to enjoy that bit of wallowing.  “No, no, _no_ —did you see that?”

In his peripheral vision, he notices Riza startling at the tone of his voice, but then he’s turning on his heel and moving for the exit; the stairs are to the right— “See what?”

“That sleazebag put something in his drink,” Roy says.  “Keep an eye on him; I’m—”

He doesn’t have time to finish that sentence, but he doesn’t need it, since she’ll know anyway.

Fortunately for his fragile skull, his instincts make him latch one hand onto the railing before he commences careening down the stairs.  If he’s fast enough, maybe he can stop this before it starts, or at least before it goes too far—

He has never, in his life, made contact with so many individual elbows before.  How are there this many elbows in the _world_ , let alone within a single building?  Where do people keep all of these stabbingly sharp objects the rest of the time?  How do they avoid slicing their own clothes to ribbons?

Admittedly, many of them aren’t wearing a great deal that qualifies as “clothes” at the moment, but the hypothetical question still stands, given that he imagines at least some of them must occasionally add other layers when they venture outside or go about their daily business.  It’s a miracle that he’s made it this far in his life without realizing what an indescribable menace elbows can be.

It’s less of a miracle that his quarry—so to speak—is so… petite.  That word doesn’t sound right—that word sounds unassuming, possibly even harmless.  He can already tell that the object of this sudden and incandescently intense obsession is anything but.

Gorgeous is, nonetheless, extremely difficult to locate in a sea of people, many of them blond, many of them dressed in black, many of them waving drinks around with a reckless abandon that gives Roy visions of spills and stains and broken glass.  Has humanity on the whole somehow significantly improved their collective ability to carry drinks around without dumping them on other people since he used to do this sort of thing?

Someone nearby gasps, howls, and then starts cursing without restraint at a very guilty-looking fellow dancer, so apparently it’s not a lost art altogether.  That’s encouraging, but it doesn’t bring him any closer to…

Gorgeous hadn’t moved more than a foot or two in any given direction over the course of the last five minutes, with the exception of the extremely swift excursion to obtain the fateful drink.  Has he changed his habits?  Roy knows he headed in the right direction; knows he zeroed in on the correct location, unless—

Two twisting bodies part ahead of him, and— _there_.

However charitably Riza tries to say otherwise, Roy is _far_ too old for this: the rush of relief leaves him giddy for a split-second, but then he plummets to the absolute depths of distress as Gorgeous, right on cue, raises his glass to his lips and drinks.

It’s not too late—not yet; the engine just jumped the tracks, but if Roy steps in, he can at least stop the rest of it from scraping off the rails and… tipping over and catching fire, or rolling off into a canyon, or… whatever it is that train wrecks usually entail.

The point is that it’s not a disaster—yet.

The culprit is, of course, too clever to have lingered at the scene of the crime, so Roy can’t just arrest him and be done with it, which leaves damage control as the first order of business.

Damage control isn’t usually _half_ this hot.

The music in this venue has more of a rock-metal flair than any of the places Roy used to haunt, but he does his best to mimic some of the absent swaying motions that the less-intrepid clubgoers around them have undertaken.  He needs to seem comfortable here, even if looking natural is probably out of the question.  People sense unease in an instant, and Gorgeous is already slightly jumpy, albeit rightfully so.  Roy would prefer not to go back to work on Monday with a black eye—especially one with an origin story that no one in the office would believe.

He sashays up to Gorgeous, doing his absolute damnedest not to betray the slightest inkling of how furiously his heart has taken up thumping in his chest.  Depending on what that shitbag dumped into the drink—and how much of it—he has a handful of minutes at the most.

“Hey,” Roy says, struggling to make his voice sound honeyed-suave and to raise it over the ungodly music at the same time.  “Can I talk to you?”

Gorgeous gives him the longest, slowest, most smoldering once-over of his entire life—and he has had a _few_.

“Hell, yeah,” Gorgeous says.  “Get talkin’.”

The shock of it chokes Roy for a critical half a second.  “I—great.  I wanted to tell you—I was up in the balcony, and I saw—”

“ _Damn_ ,” Gorgeous says, stepping closer.  He’s wearing the most gaudily, gothically terrible boots Roy’s ever had the misfortune to lay eyes on—and he’s had a few of those, too.

Roy _must_ stop letting himself get distracted by the details: by the time he glances up, Gorgeous is extremely close, at which distance he is somehow even more devastating than before.  He has delightfully expressive brows, and lovely cheekbones, and a jawline you could found a religion for, and an utterly mischievous mouth—with a silver _ring_ through his bottom lip, a quarter-inch in from the corner.  It glints as he starts to smirk; Roy’s stomach bottoms out; Gorgeous’s hair is positively exquisite, and his eyes are just this side of too brassy-bright to be called brown.

“You’re like a tall glass of water in the desert,” Gorgeous says.

Roy can think of several very stupid things to say, among which feature _You probably need several glasses of water right now_ and _Yeah?  Are you thirsty?_

“Thank you,” he manages instead, which is less stupid, but by a margin barely wider than a hair, so he’s not exactly preparing a parade.  “I really—I need to tell you—”

He used to be able to drink twice what he’s had and still sweep someone beautiful off their feet in half a heartbeat, without ever breaking a sweat.  Sometimes he does miss those days.  Sometimes he misses the headiness, the lightness, the glamor, the glitter, the adrenaline.

Sometimes he misses the power.

“I mean it,” Gorgeous says before Roy can wrangle a way around the words that will stop him in his awful-booted tracks.  “You’re pretty fucking sexy for an older guy.”

Roy—

Misplaces his line of thought—

Mourns the disappearance of the last shred of his feeble dignity—

Goes very, very still and stares at Gorgeous—

And dies a little bit inside.

On the upside, Riza always tells him that he sucks at multitasking, and evidently that’s bunk.

“I’m thirty- _five_ ,” he says, which is also bunk, and has been for ten months now, but he has at least one intricately-doodled design of a time machine in a notebook somewhere, so he’s working on it.

Gorgeous’s smirk widens, and Roy’s knees weaken.  “Like I said.”

Neither of them has, in fact, _said_ anything, as all of it’s been half- or three-quarters-shouted in the hopes of being remotely audible over the music, but Roy has already let every other thread of this conversation distract him from the purpose of it in the first place, and he can’t afford to succumb to that again.

“I am,” he says, “indescribably flattered, and I promise I would like to tell you exactly how much, in exhaustive detail, but first I—”

Gorgeous grins up at him.  “I can think of a couple ways we can get exhausted.”

“Your drink,” Roy says.

“Ain’t fuckin’ strong enough,” Gorgeous says, swilling it.  “You know how much they charge for these things?  Should be fucking gold leaf in ’em.”

Roy cannot think about Gorgeous and gold leaf—or Gorgeous on white sheets, lifting a glass of champagne to his lips, bathed in soft yellow light—

God _damn_ , it was not this difficult to think the last time he tried to talk to someone he wanted.

Another tack?

“It’s a crime,” Roy says.  “Let me—”

He reaches for the glass.

Gorgeous darts back so fast his ponytail whips up and flicks sharply behind him, one eyebrow arching.  “What the hell?”

“Nothing,” Roy says.  The increasing haziness he’s catalogued in the curious hazel eyes makes him think that he might just get away with it.  “I was just thinking you—might want to put your drink down.”  He cocks his hips, cants his shoulders, and tips his chin so that his hair will fall just _so_ into his eyes, and every single angle of his body will look flawless for a single second underneath the lights.  “To dance.”

Gorgeous stares wide-eyed and then swallows hard.

“Good idea,” he says.

Roy tries to extend a hand towards the glass more subtly this time, but before he’s even moved halfway, Gorgeous has put the rim to his lip again.

He throws his head back and downs it.

Roy _despairs_.

This is going to get very bad very fast, and he knows, now, the contours of what he’s dealing with—a fascinating, tantalizing, utterly uncontrollable combination of sass and stubbornness and an almost fumblingly sincere sort of carnality.  On an ordinary night, he’d be on his knees and begging for a phone number; on an ordinary night—

“You,” he gets out, “are a marvel.  This…” He gestures, helplessly, to the outfit.  “Is really…”

Gorgeous’s grins keep getting wilder and more reckless as the drugs mingle merrily with the alcohol and start to set in.  Roy’s heart was not built to weather storms like this.  “You wanna know a secret?”

Before Roy can articulate how very, very much his worse judgment would like to know literally everything that could possibly roll off of what he imagines is an indescribably beautiful tongue, Gorgeous has closed the last gasp of space between them and pressed his body up against Roy’s chest, rising onto his awful-booted toes to get his head next to Roy’s.

“I lost a bet,” Gorgeous whispers into his ear, all warm, wet breath and unmistakable mischief.

Roy shouldn’t find that… anything.  He shouldn’t find that anything other than slightly disturbing and vaguely amusing, but—

It’s _hot_.  He can’t help it; it is.  Knowing that this is something rare—something _special_ —something that people in the course of this golden-headed hellion’s regular life wouldn’t ever get to see—

There’s also the rather notable detail that Gorgeous just leaned on the advantage of their proximity to grind his hips against Roy’s thigh.  That is also hot.  That may be hotter than the delicate constitution of Roy’s morals can withstand.

“I bet my best friend that she couldn’t beat my GRE score,” Gorgeous says, sinking back down onto his heels, but the fact that he has to half-shout it over the music again leaves him with lit-up eyes and a giant grin, and oh, _Lord_ — “’Cause I knew that if I put it as a challenge, she’d do it, and I want her to get into all the best grad schools, and… and it’s her birthday!  So I figured—it’s perfect, right?  Figured I’d let her pick the fucking outfit, and then I’d just—show up and get turnt enough—” Roy is so old, and has so many regrets.  “—not to care, and then I’ll have a bottle of Advil for breakfast, and…”

“You shouldn’t do that to your liver,” Roy says, because he’s a fool and always has been—why stop now?  Aunt Chris didn’t raise a quitter.

“Fuck you,” Gorgeous says, so utterly cheerfully that it sounds more like a pet name than an expletive.  He pauses, then, and the hand unburdened by an empty glass lifts into the fraction of a space between them to toy with one of the buttons of Roy’s shirt.

This is—

Bad.  This is a bad sign.  He _has_ to keep his crosshairs fixed on the reality—on the _reason_ that this fantasy keeps unfolding.  A glance around them—cast as quickly as he can, lest Gorgeous think that he’s lost interest and take that as a sign to leave—confirms his suspicion that the shitheel who dragged them all into this mess is still nowhere to be found.  Likely he’s been watching from a distance, but Roy’s presence has deterred him from circling back in in the hopes of finishing the job.

Good.  Good for both of them, really, because Roy knows exactly how to get away with a murder, but he doesn’t think he has the patience tonight to follow through with the part of that procedure that would keep him out of prison.

With the music pounding around them, and Roy’s heart pounding out of time, and his head pounding too—although at least that’s more or less consistent in rhythm with the heartbeat—it’s all he can do to keep his hands under control when the only thing they want is to cradle Gorgeous’s namesake face and thumb at that lip ring and smooth back his hair.

“Wait,” Roy says, continuing to be an idiot.  Chris would be so proud.  “Is this…?”

He manages to raise his hand close enough to indicate the hellishly appealing gleam of silver in question while still just barely resisting the urge to touch it.

“Mmm,” Gorgeous says, curling his free hand into Roy’s shirtfront, and Roy can _feel_ the heat radiating off of him, distinct from the humid crush of humanity everywhere else.  “S’fake.  Spring-loaded.  Or somethin’.  I fuckin’ _hate_ needles.  Pinches a little, but it’s pretty fun.”  He pushes his tongue against it to demonstrate, and the devilish grin that follows is somehow, once again, significantly more than Roy bargained for.  “You wanna see if you can get it off?” Gorgeous asks, eyelashes dipping.  “Like—with your teeth?”

Roy would sell his fucking soul for the privilege.

“I have a better idea,” he says.

Gorgeous’s eyes inflame again.  Roy was not expecting incineration tonight.  “Oh, yeah?  What?  ’Cause there’s other shit we could _get off_ , if you know wh—”

“If I told you what it was,” Roy says, slowly curling one hand around Gorgeous’s wrist, “then it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?”

Gorgeous’s eyes have very nearly crossed into the category of bioluminescence.  “I like surprises.”

“I thought you might,” Roy says.

“I mean,” Gorgeous says, tilting in closer, “normally I don’t, but—tonight I do.  You were a surprise.  And I like you a _lot_.”

Roy wraps that clumsily in brown paper, makes sure all the edges overlap, ties it up with twine, and finishes it with a little bow.  He’s going to unwrap it later—sometime when he needs it; some three in the morning when the shadows are unkind.

But not now.

Now, he winks broadly, smirks more broadly still, and slides his fingertips up Gorgeous’s wrist to clasp his hand instead, raising it and twisting his arm to guide Gorgeous into a showy little spin.

That was a slight tactical error given what the movement of Gorgeous’s hair does to his long-since-boiling guts, but it was worth the risk: Gorgeous’s eyes are huge, and glassier than ever, and he’s putty in Roy’s hands.

He’d be putty in any hands that found him right now.  Just this once, it’s a good thing that they’re Roy’s.

He uses them to draw Gorgeous with him towards the door.  Their progress is so agonizingly slow that it feels like it triples his heart-rate as they wind their way through the maelstrom of moving bodies, and Roy has to keep sending sultry glances over his shoulder to ensure that Gorgeous is still following, for one thing; and still intrigued, for another.  He knows he can’t risk grasping too tight; this kid seems the type to balk at anything that bears even the slightest impression of a command.

To be fair, Roy can sympathize with that.

He can differentiate individual letters in the green glow of the EXIT sign, and then they’ve broken free of the fringes of the crowd, and he turns again to check on Gorgeous—

Who takes two quick strides to catch up and then fits himself under Roy’s left arm, wrapping it around his waist.  He leans his head against Roy’s shoulder and looks up through his eyelashes, so smugly that Roy can’t decide if he’s turned-on or jealous of this magnificent young demon’s talent for expressions.

He’s leaning towards the former, of course.  It’s difficult not to when he now has nothing but a fairly loose mesh between his fingertips and endless inches of smooth, warm, beautiful skin; when his captor and captivation has set Roy’s susceptible hand spare centimeters above the waistline of the utterly sinful and impossibly snug leather pants that Gorgeous somehow crammed that incomparable ass into.

Gorgeous has, in the meantime, grabbed onto Roy’s belt.  Roy has no idea where the dregs of the drink ended up.  It’s probably better not to ask questions he doesn’t want to know the answer to, and he’s having trouble formulating them when Gorgeous’s grip whispers a whole lot of _I don’t want to let go_.

That’s the drug talking—the assault.  Roy knows that.  He knows that the whole point is that he can’t take any of this at face value, because Gorgeous isn’t himself right now.  He’s muddled and woozy and high on sensations and utterly under the influence.  He doesn’t want _Roy_ ; he’s just had his brain and his body tricked into wanting nothing other than to feel good, and he stumbled on someone that he thinks will give it to him.  He must be well on his way to the drop by now.  Roy just hopes he can sort some of this out before they both hit the bottom.

He tries not to let himself dwell on how perfectly their bodies settle together as he leans into the crash-bar on the exit door and releases them out onto the sidewalk, where…

…it is _far_ too cold for someone wearing something that no respectable clothier would dare to call a ‘shirt’.

“Okay,” Roy says, mostly to himself, because it isn’t okay, but he’ll _make_ it that way if he has to.  He looks around them and spots a small alcove in the wall a little ways ahead, which he steers them over to, tightening his arm around Gorgeous.  A trio of girls in very high heels walking past stares at them openly, and Roy can’t tell if _they’re_ turned-on or jealous, either.  “Here,” he says, and he guides Gorgeous up into the indented structure in the brick, so that at least there’s a buttress of wall on either side of him to curtail the wind, and then Roy can stand in the open space to block the rest of it and get to work.

Ah.  Yet another miscalculation on a mathematically misfortunate night.

Gorgeous, backed up against the wall with Roy’s body a heartbeat away from his, is gazing up at him open-mouthed.  He doesn’t look concerned, or contemplative, or offended, or even particularly cold.

He looks _hungry_.

“Hey,” Roy says, ironing the desperation out of his voice by force.  “We need to talk, okay?  Just a little bit.”

“Talk’s boring,” Gorgeous says.  He runs the tip of his tongue slowly across his upper lip.  Roy’s guts boil.  “Pretty sure we’ve got better shit to do.”

Gorgeous is starting to have trouble focussing his eyes, and despite the combination of no-shirt and yes-wind, Roy can just make out the sheen of sweat beading at his hairline and spreading a shimmering glaze across his forehead.  They don’t have much time.

“It’ll be quick,” Roy says.  “Who did you come here with?  Was it your friend, with the birthday?”

“Yeah,” Gorgeous says.  “And her girlfriend, and my brother.  They wanted to check out another joint after this one, but I told ’em to go on without me, ’cause the music’s better here.”

“Can we call him?” Roy asks.  “Your brother.”

Gorgeous stares at him.  “Why?”

“Humor me,” Roy says.  He hauls on the lever to crank the smirk up to eleven.  “I’ll make it worth your while.”

A grin splits Gorgeous’s face.

Then it vanishes.

“Shit,” he says.  He starts patting at his hips, and then at his ass.  Roy could swear he sees stars for a second, but somehow he survives.  “My—phone.  I lost my fucking phone.  God, these pockets are the _worst_.”

“It’s fine,” Roy says.  “I’ll call him, and he can help us look for it.  What’s his number?”

Gorgeous stares blankly.

Shit.

“Okay,” Roy says.  “Do you remember what other club they were going to next?”

Gorgeous blinks.

Then he stares some more.

“Uh,” he says.  “I don’t—remember.  I don’t remember… much of… I think I maybe… had too much.”  One hand lurches up and catches the button placket of Roy’s shirt again, reeling him in as if he’s liable to run.  “But don’t—I still—”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Roy says softly, and the naked relief in Gorgeous’s expression stabs him right through the heart.  Serrated blade.  Blood everywhere.  No survivors.  “I’ll get us an Uber,” Roy says, working his phone out of his pocket and fighting to keep his fingers steady enough to tap his way through to the app, “and we can figure out the phone thing later, okay?”

The relief falls away, leaving an equally naked eagerness underscored with heat.

“Are we going to your place?” Gorgeous asks, using his handful of Roy’s shirt as leverage to haul himself in close again—too close; _way_ too close.

“We should go to yours,” Roy says.  “I—live really far away.  Yours is probably closer.”  With his right hand, he’s ordering the first Uber option his thumb will land on—regardless of the price—but in the meantime, he strokes the knuckles of the left hand down Gorgeous’s cheek and flips the smolder switch back on.  “I don’t want to keep you waiting.”

Gorgeous’s pupils are blown.  He’s visibly shaking now, and a little droplet of sweat trickles down his temple, half-veiled by his bangs.

“Okay,” he says.  Roy feels triumphant and terrible in approximately equal measure.  Is it still taking advantage if it’s for the poor thing’s own good, and he probably won’t remember any of it tomorrow?

Roy knows the answer to that.

“It’s pretty close,” Gorgeous says.  “But—I mean—me’n my brother—we live together, and Winry’s staying over, so—it’d… I dunno how late they’ll be out—”

“Worth a shot,” Roy murmurs.

“Okay,” Gorgeous says, licking his lips again before they part into another grin.  “It’s at—”

After a moment, this one disappears, too.

“I—” Gorgeous blinks, winces, frowns.  “I don’t… I _know_ what it is, but I—can’t—it’s—everything’s getting all—mixed up—in my head—”

“That’s fine,” Roy says, as soothingly as he can manage when his vital systems keep veering towards panic.  Unsurprisingly, given the popularity of this area on an average Friday night, the Uber drivers are circling like sharks.  This might almost time out all right.  “Your driver’s license will have your address on it; we can—”

“Al’s got it, though,” Ed says.  “He’s got my whole wallet.  He has _real_ pockets.  Dumbasses who lose bets don’t get real pockets.  S’a privilege.  But I had a picture of my license on my phone, and I talked the guy at the bar into accepting that.  Which was _real_ stupid, ’cause it’s even easier to doctor a picture than it is to get a fake ID.”

“Quite,” Roy says, helplessly.  He’s going to have to put in a report about this place—well, an anonymous tip.  An extremely detailed anonymous tip enumerating all of the failures, with an organized index of how they correspond to their respective code violations.  For reasons that are entirely beyond him, Jean still seems to like this spot, so he’d prefer not to be known as the one who went to great lengths to try to get it shut the fuck down.

Their Uber is imminent.

Roy glances over his shoulder at the street, willing traffic to slow down for what may just be the first time in his life—certainly for the first time in his residence in this city—as he racks his brain some more.

The little labeled photograph of their driver illuminates a tiny bulb of inspiration.

“Sweetheart,” he says.  “What’s your name?”

“Ed,” the boy says, blinking up at him beatifically this time.  Then the innocence melts as an inferno banks beneath it, and he smirks again—pure impure intention.  “I’d be Ed _ward_ for you, though.  Bet it’d be hot as _fuck_ when you said it.  You’ve got a really sexy voice.  Do people tell you that?  ’Cause you really, _really_ fucking do.”

“Thank you,” Roy says.  They do, occasionally, but since it’s usually in situations that involve a comparable blood alcohol content to the one tonight, he’s never put too much stock in it.  “What’s your last name, Ed?”

“Why?” Ed asks.

“Because some people put their phone numbers up on Facebook,” Roy says, “and your brother might be one of them.”

Ed blinks at him.  His mouth tightens and then relaxes—too swiftly, too much.  The chemicals took longer than Roy had feared to really start ravaging his systems, though.  GHB?  That’s usually the longest delay, and all the symptoms seem to match—

“Elric,” Ed says at last, and the way it rolls off of his tongue sends Roy’s mind directly into the gutter.

Roy promptly hauls his mind right back out.  Not the time; not the place; not the person.

“Perfect,” he says.  Tonight also marks the first time in his life that he’s ever regretted not having the Facebook app on his phone.  Truly an evening of untold wonders.  He taps into a browser window and concentrates all of his remaining dexterity on the task of typing.  “Let’s just—”

His phone starts ringing in his hands—an unfamiliar number from a local area code, which almost certainly means it’s their driver.

This is about to get yet more interesting.

Roy wants a nap.

He manages to swipe to answer on his third attempt.  “Hello?”

“There’s a mailbox,” a male voice says.

The part of Roy that wants a nap also wants to say _That’s nice_.

Instead he turns, pinpoints the mailbox in question—a feat complicated by the remarkable number of people meandering along the sidewalk between it and them despite the hour—and identifies a car behind it that matches the one described in the app.  Evidently their noble chariot has arrived.

“I see you,” Roy says.  He pockets his phone and tuns his attention to Gorgeous—that is, Ed—who bears a much more pronounced resemblance to a zombie than he did forty seconds ago.

Roy extends an arm to him, more to try to keep him on his feet than as an affectionate gesture.  Fortunately, he’s long since known he was bound for a less-than-palatable circle of hell one of these days, because a part of him would very much like to make it both.

Ed stares blankly for a few seconds, and then his face scrunches up.  “Are you gonna take me home?  I don’t wanna go home.”

“We’ll see,” Roy says.  Lying to him seems cruel, even if it would be easier.  Ed really does seem to bring out the extra-stupid in him.  “It’s much more likely we’ll have to go to my place.”

Ed perks up instantly—in a zombie-fied, drug-addled, disoriented sort of way—and leans forward until he almost topples into Roy’s waiting arm.  “ _Good_.  ’Kay.  Good.  C’mon.”

The look Roy receives from the Uber driver after he’s bundled a clearly intoxicated blond at least a decade his junior into the backseat beside him—and roused a round of suggestive laughter when fastening Ed’s seatbelt for him necessitated reaching across him for several fumbling seconds—settles at a very interesting midpoint between weariness and unfiltered distaste.  If Roy wasn’t quite so intimately aware of the immediate backfire effect of the phrase _This isn’t what it looks like_ , he might just try it as some sort of a sad hail Mary.

He gives the driver his address and attempts to log into Facebook despite the way Ed keeps snuggling up with his arm, which is distracting on a multitude of levels.  Roy wants to kiss the top of his head.  Facebook stalking is significantly harder on weak phone service.

“There,” he says after a supremely awkward silence in the car, to which he imagines Ed is immune at this point.  At least there’s that.  He tilts the phone screen over.  “Is this him?  Your brother?”

“Uh huh,” Ed says, almost dreamily now.  He lays his head back down on Roy’s shoulder.  “He’s _really_ smart.  He wants to get an MD and a PhD.  I asked him if I could call him ‘Doctor Doctor’ if he does that.”

Towed onward by the last feeble threads of hope, Roy taps through all of the tabs that would be displaying Alphonse Elric’s precious personal information if he was imprudent enough to share it with the internet at large.  “What did he say?”

“That I’m a weirdo,” Ed says, voice lowering gradually into a mumble now.  “But his favorite kind.”

“Your brother is very sensible,” Roy says.  He does not add _And cute_ , although that part is also undeniably true.  A devastatingly charming grin to go with the burnished hair and the mesmerizing eyes appears to run in the family.

“Told you that,” Ed mumbles.  “We gonna fuck?”

If Roy sees the other side of this night without having a stroke, he will count himself the luckiest man alive.

“Ah,” Roy says.  He can _feel_ the judgment radiating off of their driver—which shouldn’t bother him, given that he knows that he’s done nothing wrong, but his skin keeps crawling all the same.  “Maybe after you sleep off your hangover.”

“Don’t have a hangover,” Ed says.

“Trust me, sweetheart,” Roy says.  “You will.”

“Fuck you,” Ed says without much vigor—while, in fact, burying his face a little deeper in Roy’s shoulder.  He’s wearing eyeliner.  It’s a good thing Roy knows quite well how to get that out of his shirt.  “You don’t know me.”

“I don’t,” Roy says.  “But I do know liquor, and even at your a…” He can’t get it out.  It hurts too much.  “How—how old are you, exactly?”

He’s going to have judgment-radiation poisoning by the end of this ride.

He’s still going to tip and give five stars, obviously, but he’s not looking forward to the resulting slow and ignominious demise.

Ed laughs drowsily, and it takes every iota of Roy’s remaining willpower not to raise a hand and run it through his hair.  “Twenty-two.  Al just turned twenty-one and got old enough for this bullshit last month.  S’part of why we came.”

That’s… not quite as good as Roy was hoping, but not quite as bad as he feared.  The throwaway comments about graduate school were promising, as were the slightly derisive references to fake IDs.

“Why?” Ed asks again, nudging at Roy’s shoulder with his chin.  Roy can hear in his voice that he’s grinning, albeit much more sleepily than before.  “Worried?”

“Yes,” Roy says.  No harm in being honest when it might earn him a fraction of a point with the Uber driver, and Ed probably won’t remember a single instant of this conversation anyway.

“Should be,” Ed says.  “I’m a fuckin’ man-eater.”

Roy can’t help it.  He _tries_.  He tries with everything he’s got to resist the urge.

He ends up stroking Ed’s hair anyway.

“I’m sure you are,” he says.

“I _mean_ it,” Ed says.  “I’m—y’know.  Hot shit.  I’m hot shit.  All that and a bag of chips.  Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”

“Nutritious choice,” Roy says.

“It’s ’cause I’m _spicy_ ,” Ed says.

The noise that the Uber driver makes combines some of the worst elements of a groan, a whimper, and a sigh.  Roy almost feels bad for him, but at least it’s a nice change from the waves upon waves of silent judgment.

To hell with him anyway: if Roy keeps Ed talking, he can’t drift the rest of the way off into the hazy netherworld of the drugs.  It’s a wonder he hasn’t passed out or thrown up by now.  Roy imagines both occasions are in their relatively immediate future.

“Very spicy,” Roy says.  “We should rename you ‘Habanero’.”

“Eew,” Ed says.

“Don’t like habaneros?” Roy asks.

“’Course I like habaneros,” Ed says.  “Just that it’d be a shit name for me, is all.  They’re orange.  And they’re _small_.”

Roy opens his mouth.

Roy shuts it again.

The word was uttered with such pointed disdain that he senses a significantly longer and more complicated conversation there than either of them is currently prepared to undertake.

“I would hate,” Roy says, “to have to christen you ‘Banana Pepper’.”

Ed starts—giggling.  That’s the only word for it.  It’s not as full-bodied or deep-lunged as a laugh; it’s helpless and slightly high and bubbly and sweet.

Roy is too old, too tipsy, and far, far too weary of dragging around his mortal coil for all of this.

“Fucking pet name,” Ed manages.  “Worst fucking pet name—in the history of the whole universe.  You get a prize.”

“Oh?” Roy says.  “Do I want to know what it is?”

Ed whispers, extremely loudly, “Blowjob.”

Roy has to reflect, somewhat reverently, on the two simultaneous miracles that result:

He does not have an aneurysm.

Their Uber driver does not crash the car into a telephone pole and kill them all in the fiery wreckage.

On a larger scale, that may add up to mean that this is, overall, a good night.

“Okay,” Roy says.  “That’s… very generous.  Thank you.  I… well.  I’ll take a rain check on that, shall I?”

Ed snorts, which is less cute than the giggling, but still cute enough that Roy wants to hold him very tightly and protect him from the terrible world. “Who th’fuck says ‘shall’?”

“I do,” Roy says, “obviously.  Are you tired?”

“ _No_ ,” Ed says.

“Good,” Roy says.  “I would hate for you to be tired when we’re very close to my place, and we have… all these… things… to do.”

“Yeah,” Ed mumbles, grabbing a better fistful of his sleeve and nestling in closer still.  “Things.  To do.  ’N you.”

“Precisely,” Roy says.

He really, really hopes that their Uber driver is catching on, not least because they only have about another block to go before they to reach Roy’s house.

“Hey,” Ed says.  He waits until Roy makes a soft noise to indicate that he’s paying attention.  “You’re comfy.  You know that?”

“I’m baffled and impressed,” Roy says, “that you’ve managed to make that sound like an accusation.”

“I’m good at that,” Ed says.  He yawns.  “Good at lots of things.  I’ll show you.”

Roy attempts to tilt his shoulders in a way that he thinks might make them easier to rest on.  “You sure seem to be.  Are you in grad school, too?  What are you studying?”

“I dunno yet,” Ed mumbles.  “They let me in for bioengineering, but I’m half in immunology and sorta doing cancer biology, and I really like chemistry, and I gotta figure out some bioinformatics shit.”

“Oh,” Roy says.  “So no big deal, then.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Wait.  What?”

“We’re here,” the Uber driver says, several dozen decibels more loudly than is really necessary.

Ed makes a faint noise of displeasure.  “I don’t wanna move.”

“I’ll carry you,” Roy says.

The Uber driver makes a choking noise.  Serves him right.

It also serves Roy right, because hubris hounds him—in the form of a trilling, shivering, potent twinge presaging some demobilizing future back pain—the moment he attempts to lift Ed out of the car.  They should really have a separate category of Uber cars that you can select for: ones that make it easy to bridal-carry someone who’s had a bit too much to drink and _far_ too much else mixed in against their will.  Ed does his best to wrap an arm around the back of Roy’s neck, but he weighs a fucking _ton_ , and somehow Roy had forgotten just how much this noble hero gig tends to hurt.

It also makes it absolutely impossible to go for his keys.

“Ed,” he says once he’s spent a long moment standing on his own front step hating everything.  It comes out sounding rather more labored than he’d like.  “Would you… mind reaching into my pocket?”

“Oh, _baby_ ,” Ed says, with another tantalizing hitch of a laugh behind it. “’N here I was startin’ to think you were some kinda prude or somethin’, way you kept putting me off—”

“For my _keys_ ,” Roy says.  “I can’t exactly ravish you on the front lawn.”

Ed snickers and then nuzzles in close against the side of Roy’s neck, leaning in to speak, very warmly, directly into the shell of Roy’s ear: “Why the fuck not?”

“Homeowner’s association,” Roy says.  It sounds marginally less strangled than he’d expected, so he’s going to count that one as a success. “Nosy neighbors.  I have a history with local law enforcement.  Besides, I have a really, really lovely bed.  Don’t you want to see it?”

“Meh,” Ed says.  “Put me down, then; like fuck’m I gonna feel you up for free over some keys.”

Roy is not positive that that sentence makes any sort of logical sense, but any significant amount of GHB would have felled a less bullheadedly stubborn being where they stood by now, so he very gingerly complies.

He’s watching Ed’s awful boots step down onto the concrete to try to make sure they’re settled well enough to bear weight before he lets go, which is his critical mistake.  When Roy is moderately confident that Ed won’t tip over the second that Roy releases one of his steadying arms, he starts to straighten up.

Ed’s hand snaps up, fixes in his collar, and hauls him in for Ed to kiss him.

The combination of unfettered passion and sheer clumsiness in it makes it verge on violence.

That lip ring _is_ pretty fun.

Grazing one’s fingertips over Ed’s skin—up his cheek, down his jawline, back into the silky flood of his beautiful hair—could, were a susceptible man to let it, become the sort of addiction that requires a twelve-step program and an intervention.  Ed kisses with the same giddy, all-in abandon with which he seems to do everything else, and it’s more than just refreshing; it’s _revitalizing_.  It feels like curling your fingers around a little piece of heaven and holding it to your chest.  It feels like a caliber of sweet nirvana poets never wrote about, because they simply didn’t dare.  It feels like the sort of sensation that nerves were _made_ for.

It’s also inherently non-consensual, because Ed has been _drugged_ —

Roy pulls back, reeling slightly—more inwardly than outwardly, although it’s a close thing, all told.  He tries to stabilize himself before he stumbles; just about the only thing that could make this worse would be both of them face-planting on his front step and cracking a tooth or two.

“Mmm,” Ed says, eyelashes lifting so slowly that they look like they’re trembling.  Roy’s stomach flips.  He’s not sure yet if it’s in a good way; everything south of his ribcage feels like lava, and his heart’s trying to rattle its way out of his chest.  “Good with your tongue.  I like that in a man.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Roy says, not least because it’s pretty much the only thing he can muster.  “I… really hope you don’t hate me in the morning.”

Ed smirks.  “It is the morning.”

“True,” Roy says.  He keeps one hand on Ed’s shoulder—having moved it, carefully, up from where it had settled naturally and _oh_ -so-pleasantly on Ed’s waist—to try to minimize the risk of dental damage while he fumbles for his keys.  “I hope you don’t hate me in the part of the morning when you’re coherent again.”

Ed attempts to nuzzle at Roy’s hand on his shoulder, which both looks like a recipe for a sore neck and is probably a sign that he’s teetering on the verge of drug-induced unconsciousness.  “You talk… so much.  _So_ much.”

“Not the first time I’ve heard that one,” Roy says, finally besting the deadbolt despite having to keep one eye on Ed, “and likely won’t be the last. Come on, sweetheart. Pardon the mess.”

“Oh, my God,” Ed says.  “’Cause I give _such_ a shit right now.”  The instant they’re inside the door, welcomed by Roy’s all-too-familiar mountain of mail and the overflowing coat rack where less-loved jackets go to die, Ed’s temporarily-soothed affliction returns in earnest, and his body is once again magnetically drawn towards Roy’s.  “ _You_ fuckin’ come on,” he says, dragging both hands up Roy’s shirt with nearly enough force to pull the fabric with him.  “I wanna—I—”

“All right,” Roy says, focusing on keeping his breathing as slow and even as possible, and on keeping all of the piteous canine _whines_ building in his throat well clear of his mouth.  “Let’s just—take this to the bedroom.  Okay?  Much more comfortable than my disaster of a foyer.  Here, come on.”

“’Kay,” Ed murmurs, wriggling his way in under Roy’s arm and wrapping it around himself again, and _God_ , if it were just any other circumstances—if it was just not like _this_ —

Roy knows he’s stupid.  He knows blonds make him stupider still; and he knows that he takes arrows to the chest like Boromir at the mercy of the Uruk-Hai as soon as there’s cutesiness involved.  He knows he’s a die-hard romantic, as in _liable to die_ and _hard-headed_ ; and he knows that knowing it gives him no power whatsoever to hold his own idiocy at bay.

Taking an unreasonably pliable gorgeous blond kid— _kid_ , twenty-two and theoretically bright-eyed and definitely unholily limber—into his bedroom charts among the worst ideas he has ever had in his life, despite the intense competition for the spots on that list.

He takes a deep breath, summons whatever he has left that passes for human decency, and catches Ed’s shoulders in both hands as they approach the bed.  He pushes—gently—to force Ed to sit on the edge of his mattress, pretending not to notice how rumpled the sheets are, because who has time to make their bed first thing in the morning, anyway?

“Sit tight for just a second, sweetheart,” Roy says.  Ed stares up at him—the chemicals seem to have made another bid for control of him.  It seemed like reaching their destination woke him up for a minute, but he’s quickly sinking back beneath the tide again.

Roy snatches up the water glass that he leaves on one of the nightstands—not the nightstand that also bears the alarm clock; he learned that lesson the hard way, although mild electrocution makes for an effective wake-up call in a pinch—and darts out into the hall.  He fills it from the bathroom tap and hastens back in: Ed hasn’t moved.

Roy holds the glass out, but Ed just keeps staring up at him, with a trace of bewilderment seeping into the absent expression now.

“Hey,” Roy says, softly.  He catches one of Ed’s hands in his and lifts it to the side of the glass.  Miraculously, Ed takes the hint, and then takes the glass.  “Drink this for me.”

Ed mumbles something very quiet that sounds like “Mmkay,” gazing into the glass like the surface of the water is fascinating.  Roy sure hopes he remembers how to drink.

…water, that is.  Roy knows he remembers how to drink.

Roy slips back out to start gathering the contents of the linen closet into his arms.

Somewhere in the depths lurks a fairly high-end foam sheet, designed to be interposed between one’s back and the miserable conglomeration of rocks, sticks, dirt, and vindictive little pebbles that take the place of a cushy mattress when one makes the questionable decision to go camping. Camping was, of course, Maes’s idea.  When they unpacked, everyone laughed themselves silly over Roy’s collection of primly-rolled bed-length sheets of foam.  By midnight, however, the Hunger Games had broken out over the second and third ones, at which point he demonstrated his best _draw me like one of your French girls_ poseon the one that he’d claimed and enjoyed the show.  He’s pretty sure Riza stole one of them after the trip; the other one probably still lives under the rug in front of his fireplace, a forgotten testament to that girlfriend whose perpetually cold feet led to them spending a lot of quality time on that carpet.

That’s fine.  He’s exhausted enough that the remaining one and a pile of pillows and a slightly musty old comforter will almost certainly fit the bill as far as a suitable place to sleep goes.

He pauses before he’s completely immobilized his own arms with a wad of pillows, because it occurs to him that he should reassure Riza, thief that she is, that he’s still alive.

 _Hope Jean has retained his clothing,_ he writes.   _I rescued gorgeous goth blond.  He’s getting a phd.  Pray for me._

Shit must not be hitting the fan too vigorously yet over there, because the ellipsis bubble pops up before he’s even turned off the screen on his phone, and then she’s written back:

 _No comment_ , followed by a prayer hands emoji, followed by _Is it too obvious to comment that you want the phD?_

He sends back _RUDE_ and an angry face, then pockets his phone and gathers up the pillows, his wits, and his willpower.  He expects he’ll need all of them.

Sure enough, the moment that he deposits the ungodly pile of mismatched bedclothes on the floor at the foot of the bed, he discovers that Ed has… stripped.

Probably it was only a matter of time, but the visual of Ed collapsed facedown on Roy’s sheets, in nothing but a very tight pair of spandex boxer-briefs, makes Roy’s brain spin heedlessly for a long, long second.  They are— _very_ tight, but even so, Roy can’t believe he was able to fit them under those damnable leather pants, which are now crumpled on the floor, topped with a tangle of abandoned mesh.  Ed’s ass is somehow even more amazing without pants in the way.  Just—the _curve_ , the shape, the fullness, the… Christ, Roy needs a cold shower and a hot cup of coffee; he needs a nap and a lobotomy and a really good lay, and…

Ed shivers.

At least that shakes Roy out of the rather lascivious reverie and sends him directly to his bureau, from which he extracts his softest old sweatshirt and a pair of pajama pants that he knows he washed in recent memory.  He brings both back to the bed and touches Ed’s left shoulder gently.

“Hey,” he says.

He earns nothing more than a vague mumble and a thorough re-burying of Ed’s face in Roy’s pillow in response.  In the lull, Roy’s eyes dart across the tantalizingly well-formed muscles of Ed’s back to…

His right shoulder.  Which is riddled and criss-crossed and teeming with thick, lengthy scars.

They track and twist like intertwining ribbons all the way along his arm, curling just down past his wrist.  At least that explains the single sleeve.  Roy wishes it didn’t—wishes this wasn’t clearly something that Ed feels compelled to cover; wishes it wasn’t obviously a source of shame, or regret, or revulsion, or… something.  Wishes it wasn’t, period.  Wishes it wasn’t a detailed history of a nearly unimaginable amount of pain.

“Okay,” he says when Ed still doesn’t move.  “I’ll send you the chiropractor bill a little later, love.   _Come_ on.”

With quite a lot of wrangling of a more or less insensible Ed—his eyelids flicker, and he responds to direct prompting with discontented mumbling, so Roy’s relatively confident that it’s a drug-deepened sleep rather than a blackout—Roy manages to cram the beautiful little rag doll on his bed into the sweatshirt and the pajama pants, and then to tuck him into the bed.  Ed immediately rolls onto his back and folds his left arm across his chest.

“No,” Roy says.  “We don’t get to sleep like that when we might choke on our own vomit.”  He starts pulling.  “On your side.  Come on—Ed, _please_ , don’t make me—”

After a significant amount of further finagling, quite a lot of coaxing that seems to go woefully unheard, and some motion that can really only be qualified as manhandling in the most literal sense, Roy manages to get Ed settled on his right side, close to the edge of the mattress, in a way that will hopefully minimize incidents of an asphyxiatory nature, as well as ones that involve puke in Roy’s bed.  Everybody wins.

Just in case, though, he makes another foray into the bathroom to retrieve its trash can, which is taller and better-lined than the one in here, and sets his prize close by the head of the bed.  There is a bright silver lip ring—which does indeed look to be spring-loaded—settled on the nightstand next to the lamp.

Roy has a useless tote bag in this room somewhere; he just knows it.  He’ll even take an un-eco-friendly plastic one at this point; or a paper one, or… anything that will hold objects for them to be carried at a later time.  Is that really too much to ask at one in the morning when he just snatched himself and a victimized party out of the jaws of two very different kinds of danger?  Surely the universe can turn up _one goddamn bag_ —

He gives up on his rat bastard traitor of a bedroom and returns to the linen closet.  The linen closet is, apparently, campaigning for the title of MVP of this ridiculous night, as it yields up several little bags with zippers for sorting and separating the contents of one’s luggage, presumably purchased for Roy by someone who had never met either him or an honest-to-God suitcase.  One of the bags has a handle on it.  Roy brings it back to the bedroom, rallies his feeble constitution one more time, and turns Ed’s pants right-side-out before folding them and packing them inside.

Surely he has now done enough to make up for several past lives’ worth of indiscretions.  At least a handful of the trespasses in this one.

He kicks his pile of foam and blankets and pillows into a marginally more cohesive shape, shucks off his shirt and slacks in favor of a different pair of pajamas, and drops down onto the mess of mostly-soft things.  He is _way_ too old for this, and almost too tired to care.

  


* * *

  


Al is a grownup, and he isn’t going to cry out of a combination of fear and frustration.

“Voicemail again,” he says.  He hangs up and redials.  If his battery doesn’t hold out, he’s hosed.  And he’s going to upgrade to a different brand of phone in protest.  “He probably can’t even hear it ringing.”

“He should feel it, though,” Paninya says, rocking back on her heels and staring up at the nearest streetlamp.  Does she think she’s a moth?  Ed went goth; Paninya went moth; everyone’s having an existential crisis.  This is why Al hates going out.  “You ever worn pants that tight?  You would feel that vibration _all_ over your butt.”

The less Al thinks about vibrating things and Brother’s butt, the better, and he’s about to say so when the line catches, and a voice that is indistinct but identifiably not Ed’s says, “Hello?”

“Hello,” Al says, struggling to keep the catch out of his own voice.  “This is my brother’s phone.  I guess he must’ve lost it.”

“Yeah,” the guy says.  “Happens a lot.  Somebody brought it to the bar a couple of minutes ago, but I haven’t had a chance to get it to the lost and found at the coat check yet.  You can come pick it up if you want.  I’m at Nightshade.”

The plot thickens.  Or thins.  Or… changes in consistency in some manner, to be certain.

Nightshade is the very first club they went to, with the loud and sometimes screamy music and a lot of people dressed in the sort of things that Ed sighs wistfully over when he sees them in the window displays of Hot-Topic-like accessory stores.

“That would be great,” Al says.  “Thank you very much.  I really appreciate it.”

“Sure thing,” the guy says, and then he hangs up.

Al stares down at his phone for a few seconds.  He shouldn’t have had that one drink, even though it had an umbrella in it, and it was such a pretty magenta color, and it tasted sort of like cake.  How do people _do_ this?  His brain is so muddled already; it feels like the words he wants to say just keep sticking to the inside of his skull like wet butterfly wings instead of arranging themselves into the order he’d need to speak a sentence.

“The nice man said he’s a bartender at Nightshade,” Al manages, somehow, through the swirl of deliberate self-poisoning further agitated by the double-time beat of building anxiety.  “Maybe Ed realized he lost it and just stayed there.”

“Sure,” Paninya says, in a way that inspires Al with _zero_ confidence.  Absolute zero.  Zero degrees Kelvin.  He’s definitely going to cry.

But he might have another five or ten minutes in him first, and he fully intends to use them, so he forges on ahead down the sidewalk, knowing Winry and Paninya will follow him.

Unsurprisingly, they get carded again on their way in, and a couple people side-eye them as they attempt to skirt their way around the edge of the mosh-pit-ish part of the dance floor on their way to the bar.  You’d think none of these people had ever seen a bow-tie before.

Al steps up into one of the few open spaces against the bar—the surface of which is glass, with a very weird and very fascinating glowing liquid flowing underneath, which mesmerized him and Ed for almost five solid minutes when they first arrived; they were only able to shake themselves from its thrall at that point because Winry threatened to leave them there forever—and waits for one of the bartenders to notice him.  He might consider shouting or something, but he’s not sure he could make himself heard over the music without screaming fit to strain his voice; and besides, that would be rude.  And gosh, it’s not like every second he wastes by standing here wringing his hands is another second in which something horrible and terrible that is entirely his fault by way of negligence could be happening to Ed, or anything; and—

One of the bartenders turns, spots him, pauses, and heads over.  Thank _goodness_.

“Hey,” the guy says.  He has a stick through his ear and a ring through his nose.  The part of Al that is still swimming through ethanol wants to ask how much that hurts, because they look kind of neat, and they’re very shiny.  “Can I help you?  Gonna need some ID.”

“I just called about my brother’s phone,” Al says.  Too late, he notices another person flitting around the other side of the bar, since it’s built in a giant circle to maximize the serving surface area.  Smart, that.  But inconvenient, and making Al’s pulse flutter harder and faster yet.  “Um—do you—?”

“Oh, yeah,” the bartender says.  He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a very familiar black phone case.  “Here.  Somebody brought it by a little while ago.  Said they found it on the floor right next to the bar.”

“It’s good it didn’t get stepped on,” Al says, which is stupid, but so is going out, so at least that sort of fits.  “Um—” Hastily, he pulls out his own phone, pocketing Ed’s instead, and turns it around to show the guy his home screen.  “This is my brother.  I don’t—I mean, do you happen to remember him?  Or have you maybe seen him recently?”

The guy grimaces, which Al would guess is because this kind of question is both fairly common and fairly awkward, rather than because he thinks Ed is yucky-looking.  Ed is definitely not yucky-looking, whatever Ed himself thinks when he’s determined to be self-deprecating.  Al doesn’t think there is the slightest possible propensity for yuck in the entirety of their shared genome, and he made sure to pick an especially flattering picture of both of them from their recent trip to the theater, even though he sort of wanted to use the photo of Ed fast asleep in his seat by intermission.

“It was, like, two hours ago,” the bartender says, and Al’s heart starts sinking towards his shoes and shows no signs of stopping when it hits the floor.  “He had a picture of his driver’s license on the phone.  Talked Bryan into putting three shots’ worth of blue kamikazes into one glass.”

“Of course he did,” Al says, feeling rather like a stiff wind would tip him over.  Ed, drunk and coy and dressed like that, set loose on the unsuspecting populace—or, really, at the mercy of the un _deserving_ populace—

Anything could happen.

Al knows their family, and their family’s luck.  He knows that _anything_ usually means _something bad_.

“Um,” Al says, knowing full well that it’s a record-breaking long-shot, “have you seen him since then?”

The bartender winces.  “Sorry, man.  There’s a _lot_ of blond kids wearing black in this joint.”

“I know,” Al says, as his heart continues to descend through several layers of the Earth’s outer crust, proceeding rapidly towards the mantle.  “I—yeah.  Well—thank you.  I really appreciate your help.”

“Good luck,” the guy says.

Al slinks back over to Winry and Paninya, looking down at Ed’s phone as if a miracle might occur, and it might yield up something like a clue.

“Can’t see him anywhere,” Winry says.

“He couldn’t have gotten into another place without either his ID or his phone,” Paninya says slowly.  “And he wasn’t hanging around outside, or we would’ve seen him.”

“Let’s take another look around,” Winry says.  “Just in case.”

She doesn’t say _Just in case he’s passed out in a corner somewhere_ or _Just in case somebody murdered him in a back room and crammed his corpse into a closet_ , but that’s what Al hears anyway.

Very little of their final journey around the premises registers in his head, because his brain is far too full of worst-case scenarios to fit much of anything else.  He remembers stumbling a bit when they skip up the stairs to peek around a few different parts of the balcony and then give the crowd below one last scan from above, but mostly it’s just sort of an indistinct wash of worry.  Ed isn’t here.  He can feel it.  He _knows_.

“I don’t see him,” Paninya says, and Al has to bite back some sort of snarky comment about how obvious that is; how obvious it is that they _did_ this.  Winry’s still looking around them and biting her lip, but Paninya glances over at Al.  Some of his many mixed emotions must be showing on his face, because she says, “Let’s get outside for a second and get some air so we can figure out what we’re gonna do, yeah?”

Like there’s anything they _can_ do.  Like there’s any recourse left to them; like there’s any _hope_ —

Once they're back out on the breezy sidewalk, Winry says, “Okay,” and then puts her hands on her hips.  “Step one is… let’s not freak out.”

“Easy for you to say,” Al says, battling another upswell of panic.  It feels—skittery.  Like rats climbing up his throat at a fevered pace.  A thousand little tiny tapping claws.  “He could be dead in a ditch by now.”

Winry stares at him for a second, then looks at Paninya.

Paninya shrugs.  “Al’s the only person on Earth who waited until he was legally twenty-one to drink anything.  We had no way of knowing he was gonna be a melodramatic one.”

“That’s mean,” Al says, “and— _worse_ —it’s beside the point.”

“Everything’s going to be fine,” Winry says.  “Ed’s a big boy; he can take care of himself.”

“Winry,” Al says.  “You know how stupid Ed gets at four in the morning?”

“Sure,” Winry says, “but it’s not even one, a—”

“He’s _twice_ that stupid when he’s drunk,” Al says.  “Maybe three times.  It’s legendary.  He gets really stupid, and really reckless, and really, _really_ thirsty.”

Winry pauses.  “You mean—physically-thirsty, or horny-thirsty?”

Al low-key wants to die right now.  “I said he got stupid, didn’t I?”

“Oh, crap,” Winry says.  “Why didn’t you say something?  We set him loose in there in the most provocative outfit known to humanity—”

“Not quite,” Paninya says.

“—and then abandoned him to get drunk and ruin his own life,” Winry says.  “Are you telling me you _knew_ this was going to happen?”

“No!” Al says, and this time the tears really are going to strangle him; he can feel the heat bathing his collarbones and creeping up his throat as they dig in deep and start stinging behind his eyes.  “Of course not!  I didn’t think we were gonna _lose_ him!”  He buries his face in his hands, but it’s probably too late.  “I just—I thought—he’d wanna listen to one more song, and then he’d come find us!  I didn’t think he’d—stay there, or that we’d—forget—but—there’s just so many people, and they’re all so drunk, and people are _horrible_ , and my head’s all spinny, and it’s my _f-fault_ , and—”

“Shit,” Winry says, and then she wraps both arms around him before he can run and starts gently rocking him back and forth.  “Al, it’s okay!  It’s not your fault, for one thing; it’s Ed’s fault for being an idiot.”

“We _left_ him!” Al says.

“He’s the oldest one of us,” Winry says.  “He should know better.  And he should know himself better.  He should’ve known he was gonna get smashed and super thirsty, and he should have made sure to stay with us so that he didn’t go out and have a one-night stand with some weirdo or s—oh, my God.  I’m sorry, Al.”  Al’s sorry, too—about all of it, and also about crying all over her cute shirt.  “That’s… not what I meant to… let’s rewind,” she says.  “To the part where it’s okay.  We’ll just—I’m sure he’ll make it home soon.  Right?  If he doesn’t have his phone, or his wallet, he can just… he can… call a cab, and then come up and get some money from us.  That’s the only rational thing to do.  He’s still really smart even though he’s an idiot.  Right?”

Al gives up on trying not to sob.  Holding them back hurts more than just getting them right the heck on out there, anyway; he always feels sort of shakily cleared-out and washed-clean when the worst of it has passed through him.

“Y’know, Win,” Paninya says, patting Al’s exposed shoulder a little as Winry rubs the other and makes little shushing noises that are probably supposed to be soothing, “when you asked me why we didn’t go out more, and I said ‘Have you _met_ us?’, this was kind of what I meant.”

“Fair,” Winry says.  “Al—hey, Al.  C’mon.  Let’s go to 7-Eleven and get you some of those little powdered-sugar donut abominations that you like, so we can help your body get a head start absorbing the alcohol, and then let’s go back to your place and call around and see if anybody’s seen Ed.  Okay?  It’ll be fine.  He’ll be fine.  I promise.”

“You also p-promised we were gonna have fun,” Al says.

“We did,” Winry says.  “Right up until about fifteen minutes ago.”

“I don’t want Donettes,” Al says.  “I want my _brother_.”

“Okay,” Winry says, rubbing his back.  “We’ll… you know what we’ll do?  We’ll go home, and we’ll put together a map, and we’ll call every bar and restaurant around here.  Probably he wandered into someplace when he got hungry.  They’ll remember.  That shirt is… attention-getting.  Okay?  Somebody will have seen him.”

Al sniffles, but it does sound better than just standing here and crying about all of the horrible things that might be happening to Ed right now.  “Okay.  I guess.”

Winry makes some sort of a frantic motion in Paninya’s direction, which is probably some early draft of a universal hand-sign for _order a rideshare_.  “Great.  That’s what we’re gonna do.  We probably have Donettes at home anyway.”

“We don’t,” Al says.  “Ed ate them all.”

“Jeez,” Paninya says.  “Are you sure you want him back?”

Al can’t see her expression after that, because he’s too busy bursting into tears again, but he gets the feeling it’s a variation on the theme of _Yeah, we’re definitely never going out again_.

Good.

  


* * *

  


Ed knows two things in the first instant he’s awake:

First, he’s obscenely warm and cozy in this bed.

Second, he’s about to puke so much that he might expel a kidney.  Or his liver, more likely—it’ll probably push its way to the front of the line of organs to be vomited out so that it can leave his body in protest of all of the recent abuse.

He discovers a third thing as he attempts to fling himself off of the mattress and up onto his feet:

This is not _his_ bed.

He stumbles a half-step away from it—his head and his guts are spinning competitively now, and he can’t tell which one’s whirling faster.

He no longer knows which of his observations is the worst.

The mounting heave of the nausea surges up again, and his diaphragm jumps, and he claps one hand over his mouth, but his eyes haven’t adjusted to the dark yet, and he doesn’t fucking know where—

A very low, very attractive voice says, “Shit,” followed by “Hold on,” followed by rustling, and shadows flitting, and the beginnings of clarified shapes.  Parts of the dark thin out rapidly while Ed tries to choke down the bile by force; a bit of the deepest darkness solidifies into a person—moderately tall, nice breadth on the shoulders.  The person bends and picks something up from the floor, pushes it into Ed’s hands—

Cold.  Metal?  Capacious, which is what matters, because—

Up it comes, and in the time since his last waltz with food poisoning, Ed had somehow managed to forget the stark intensity of the terror in the first moment that you lose the ability to breathe.

And how much it burns.

And how unpleasant the first desperate, rattling, wet half-breath in after the first expulsion feels—the dragging, sticking attempt to drag in new oxygen, interrupted by another rolling wave of upward motion, and—

Back he goes, chin to the rim of the trash can, guts striving to flip themselves inside-out.

Ungrateful bastards.  He takes pretty decent care of them at _least_ seventy-eight percent of the time.

“It’s okay,” the disembodied beautiful voice says softly as he gasps for breath a bit more successfully this time.  The voice then becomes much less-disembodied as a deft hand smoothes Ed’s hair back away from his face and then settles on his shoulder.

“It is _not_ ,” Ed manages to croak out.  “Fucking—why the hell do our fucking larynxes have to merge with the esophagus anyway?  Intelligent design my fucking _ass_.  Pharynxes are bullshit.  I—”

It occurs to him, as he tries valiantly to swallow down another round of stomach contents that really want to get reacquainted, that he’s standing in some fucking stranger’s bedroom, vomiting into said stranger’s wastebasket and bitching profanely about the anatomical basis of a consequence of his own making.

Mom would be ashamed of his manners right now.

He ducks down and throws up again.

Then he grits his teeth and fights for something like control of his already-aching diaphragm, and he gets a couple serviceable breaths in.

“I’m—really sorry,” he says.  “I’m _really_ sorry.”

“It’s fine,” the guy says, which is awful firstly because it makes Ed feel guiltier; and awful secondly because it means that no matter how nice this guy’s voice is, he’s obviously not very bright.  “No need to be sorry.”

“You got a bathroom?” Ed asks—which is about the worst possible way to phrase the question, given that every home he’s ever been in has _had_ one, although admittedly a few were outhouses where he grew up—but it’ll get the point across, and that’s something to go on at this point.

“Are you ready?” Voice-Ten-Brains-Three asks, and one of the hands—hands are already a six even in the dark—settles gently on Ed’s shoulder-blade to start guiding him… somewhere in the dimness.  The dimness resolves into a slightly narrower space on both sides, which is presumably a hallway; and then the hand shepherds him through a doorway— “Close your eyes?”

Unthinkingly, Ed does as instructed—and then cowers away, clutching his nasty-ass trashcan closer to his chest, as a switch flicks, and his eyelids light up orange.

“Sorry,” the voice says, but Ed’s already cracking one eye open cautiously to plot out the shaky steps remaining between him and his mysterious savior’s toilet.

He bends down to set the trash can on the floor—which was a mistake, because straightening again makes his stomach squeeze up; and then he fumbles to get a grip on the countertop, fails, gives up, and drops to his knees, bruises be damned—

Bizarrely, in the split-second that he has left before he gets to sing the miserable sick song to a wall of porcelain this time, it occurs to him that this guy must be single—or at least live alone—because anyone as considerate as he’s been so far would be the type to put the seat down if he lived with anybody else.

The sick part sort of takes precedence after that.

Three more good—well, _horrible_ —heaves barely bring up anything but bile and spit, though, and as he sits back on his heels and takes a couple slightly steadier breaths, he finally dares to sneak a glance over at the guy whose night he has now thoroughly, thoroughly ruined.

Oh, shit.

Oh, _shit_.

The guy is not just hot—he’s drop-dead, knockout, magazine-cover, click-bait-article-thumbnail, stalker-picture-on-your-phone-so-your-friends-don’t-think-you’re-lying hot.  His hair looks like it’s sort of artfully mussed most of the time—although not right now, because right now it’s the kind of unintentionally messy that you get from scraps of mediocre sleep.  There’s a little line on his cheek from a fold in a blanket or a pillowcase or something, and his eyes are _incredible_ —beautiful-dark and tapered and incisive and interesting even with exhaustion dragging at his also-gorgeous eyelashes.  Ed is—

Staring, is what he’s doing.  It’s probably too late already, but he attempts to focus intently on reaching up to flush the toilet, and then he looks down at himself so that he won’t be tempted to stare some more and _savor_ it.

He is wearing…

A well-worn sweatshirt that’s about three sizes bigger than he is, and soft blue plaid pajama pants that are way too long.

He is wearing this guy’s fucking _clothes_.

Did they fuck?

Did they fuck, and Ed doesn’t _remember_?

Jesus fucking Christ.  The universe has always been unjust, obviously, but this is on a whole new level of—

Shit, fuck, _hell_ —he doesn’t feel sore, but there’s a lot they could’ve accomplished without any noticeable stretching or bruising or any kind of sweat that would be distinguishable from what might’ve come from dancing or a drunk and dreamless sleep—

Which—

Begs another question.

Ed gathers himself up and holds it together as he looks again.  His host displays no trace of either the smug, contented half-smile of a man who had a good fuck, or of the faint, cringe-edged attempt at equanimity that indicates a bad one.  He just looks sort of… tired.  Maybe a little bit relieved.

Maybe the relief is because he can tell that Ed can’t remember _what_ they did or didn’t do, so tonight’s mistake is obviously not about to go bragging to his friends about the unthinkable achievement.

“How long was I out?” Ed asks—which is much more challenging than it should be.  Despite the fact that none of those words boasts more than a single syllable, they resist his attempts to corral them into a recognizable sentence order for several seconds before they’ll let him speak.

The guy glances down at his Apple Watch.  Because he wears an Apple Watch.  Apparently even to sleep.  Because of course he does.

The worst part is that Ed still wishes that they’d fucked.

“About two hours,” the guy says.

“Shit,” Ed says.  Apple Watch or not, this guy keeps his toilet super fucking clean, God bless him, so at least Ed doesn’t feel any more unsanitary now than before he started leaning on it.  “I—Jesus.  I’m sorry.  I’m really sorry.”

“I’m just glad you’re all right,” the guy says.  There’s a mild sort of almost-smile expression playing around his face, and he actually sounds like he means it.  “It was a little touch-and-go for a while there.”

Ed manages to raise one hand, resisting the urge to wipe his palm on the borrowed sweatshirt before he pushes his hair back out of his face.  His whole mouth tastes sour.  “I… Christ.  I swear I’m not normally like this—I don’t do shit like this, or act like that, or… this is so fucking embarrassing.”

“Hey,” the guy says.  “If you don’t get a couple humiliating misadventures in when you’re young, you’re missing out.  I certainly had my share.  More than my share, possibly, if you ask some of the people who witnessed them.”

Ed looks at him sidelong, which seems to be the only way that’s safe.  Even trashed and wrecked and collapsed against the cabinet, dressed in pajamas and under harsh bathroom light, this guy looks like all of Ed’s wildest fantasies—the really far-fetched ones where he has a personal unicorn with a mane made out of fire, and a hot boyfriend who treats him well and listens to him and buys him ice cream just for the hell of it sometimes.  “You have some fucking angel show up in your hour of need and save you from yourself, too?”

“Occasionally,” the guy says, with another one of those enigmatic partial smiles.  “I suppose if you look at it that way, I’m paying it forward.”

Ed takes a deep breath and lets it out slow.  His stomach no longer feels like it’s going to keep trying to reverse the orientation of its own lining and upend its contents all over this guy’s nice, clean toilet bowl until Ed just sort of expires out of exhausted dehydration.  “Well—shit.  I mean, ‘thanks’ isn’t even… doesn’t even start to cover it.”  He clears his throat, which still hurts a little, and still tastes a little bit like bile.  “What—you mind if I ask what your name is?”

“Roy,” the guy says.  “Roy Mustang.”

“My hands are nasty,” Ed says, “or I’d shake.  Um—Ed.”

“I know,” Roy says.  “But it’s nice to make it official.  Pleasure to meet you again, this time in my bathroom at four in the morning.”

“Is it fucking four?” Ed manages.  He doesn’t know if his knees will hold him yet.  “ _Shit_.  Al’s probably tried to get the FBI to start looking for me across state lines by now.”

Roy checks his watch again.  His Apple Watch.  Ed is in pain, but he remembers his manners and keeps his mouth shut in spite of the agony.

“Ah,” Roy says.  Apparently he’s the kind of guy who wears an Apple Watch to sleep _and_ the kind who says ‘Ah’ as an actual interjection in actual conversations.  Why is he still hot?  Ed hates everything.  Next year he’s going to shove a sheet cake through Winry’s mail slot and then leave.  “I guess I overestimated.  It’s just a little past three.”

“Cool,” Ed says.  “Maybe just the next couple counties’ sheriffs.”  He knuckles at his eyes.  He has to wake up enough to… do something.  “Did I—where the hell is my phone?”

“As far as we know,” Roy says, “you misplaced it.”

Ed stares at him for a different reason this time.  He’s just as hot now as he was two seconds ago, yes, but this time the despair takes precedence.

“I lost it,” Ed says.  “That’s what you mean.”  Swallowing sucks given that everything still tastes gross as _hell_ , but he doesn’t have too many other options.  “I don’t—Jesus.  I don’t remember drinking that much.  I had—I mean, a _few_ , but mostly I was just tryin’ to dance until I embarrassed the heck out of Al, and… I was gonna…” He racks his brain, but it’s like digging through goopy black dreck and trying to come up with something solid.  “Catch up?  Or something.  And I got the bartender to accept a picture of my ID, and… that’s… but that was, like, my _second_ drink.  Damn things cost too much anyway.”

Roy leans against the door of the cabinet under the sink, looking not at all unlike a seriously off-kilter Renaissance painting.

“Do you remember anything about the guy who was coming on to you?” he asks.

Ed doesn’t like the voice Roy put on just now—it’s different than the one before.  It’s a little bit tighter, a little bit tougher, and a lot more… professional.

“What guy?” Ed says.  “You mean you?”

That’s a gamble.  He _vaguely_ remembers getting really, really up-close-and-personal with somebody on the dance floor who put a whole flock of butterflies in his stomach, and he has a distant impression of dark hair and dark eyes, but…

Roy smiles slightly.  “Touché.  Before that.”  Holy shit.  Ed wishes they could call a quick time-out on this conversation so he can take a second to appreciate the fact that he apparently won the getting-hit-on jackpot a couple hours ago.  “The one you almost gave a well-deserved black eye when he tried to put his hands on you.  From what I could tell, mid-twenties, about six foot.  Short brown hair and a goatee.”

Ed’s heart starts sinking like a sharkbitten dinghy.  “What are you, a cop?”

“Yes,” Roy says.

The dinghy beats twice, somewhat forlornly.

“What?” Roy asks.

“I fucking hate cops,” Ed says, and if his voice shakes the tiniest bit—whatever.  He’s trapped like a rat.  He’s allowed.

“I don’t blame you,” Roy says, and that throws Ed for another loop that his wobbly head can’t handle.  “But I’m almost positive that that man drugged you, and it would be very vindicating to be able to do something about it.”

Ed stare at him.  “Y—what?  Wait.”

So much for anything like watertightness: the dinghy is going all the way down to the bottom of the Marina Trench.

Ed feels… cold.  Cold, and like his fingertips are starting to go numb.

“Are you—” He keeps trying to find a way to say it that sounds anything less than impossibly surreal.  “No fucking way.  Are you saying somebody slipped me a fucking roofie?”

Roy winces, so at least he’s partly human.  “Well—yes.  Or at least that is very much what it looked like.”

“The fuck?” Ed says.  “ _Why_?”

Roy’s staring at him, for a change.  He’s not sure if that’s a good thing.  On further reflection, he’s pretty sure it’s not.

He realizes—too late; always too late—that anyone who dressed him in some cozy-ass hand-me-downs while he was blacked the fuck out would have seen _everything_.  Unless it was dark as hell in the room at the time, this Roy guy would have landed himself a free and unwanted front-row seat to the dense network of scars all over Ed’s right arm and the opposite leg—probably he would’ve had a good enough view to draw himself a map, if there was anything carved there that’s halfway worth transcribing.

“Well, whatever,” Ed says before this miserable conversation can spiral any further into the Pit of Awkward, never to be seen again.  “I’ll just—let me just help you take out your trash, and then I’ll call a cab.”

Roy blinks at him serenely this time, which is marginally better than staring, but not much.  There’s something vaguely condescending in it—like he’s waiting for Ed to piece together an amusing little puzzle.  It’s not the worst Ed’s seen by a longshot, but it sure is a little bit… bastardly.

“Oh,” Ed says.  “Shit.  Jesus.  Okay, um—I’ll—borrow your phone to call a cab, and—”

“Let me drive you,” Roy says.  “After the night we’ve both had, it’ll set my mind at ease.”

Ed can’t help wincing hard.  “No.  No way.  I mean—you’ve already done way too much.  Like, _way_ too much.  People aren’t supposed to be this nice.  It’s abnormal.  And—evolutionarily unsound, when you really think about it.  You should probably see a doctor about that.”

Roy smiles, and the shape of it _barely_ arches close to a smirk, but Ed gets another whiff of that bastardly thing again.  “Aren’t you going to be a doctor?  This conversation ought to count.”

Ed may or may not be flushing slightly.  He can’t confirm or deny it either way, or at least not without sacrificing some fraction of the minuscule amount of dignity he has left.  “Did I talk about that?  I mean—yeah, theoretically, but not the kind that’s useful, so it… Look, I—I mean—if you _really_ wanna go get in your car at three in the morning to drop my dumb ass off, like—at least you gotta let me PayPal you later for the gas or something.”

Roy opens his mouth.

He closes it again.

He swallows, and then his smile takes on a very neutral character before he says, “That sounds like a deal.”

Interesting.

Ed has no idea what the fuck it _means_ , but it's definitely interesting all the same.

“One second,” Roy says as Ed sits there working the stale sourness around in his mouth and regretting the moment of his inception.  One hand goes up to the counter for leverage before Roy hauls himself up, and he definitely grinds his teeth a little bit on the way.  Given the excessive quantity of aches and pains and other assorted bullshit that Ed already has to deal with, he’s _really_ not looking forward to breaking thirty, if he makes it that far.  “I know I have a…” The medicine cabinet opens, then closes again; Roy crouches down—nice ass, _damn it_ —and checks one of the shelves in the cabinet under the sink instead.  “Aha.”  Rarely has Ed ever seen someone brandish a toothbrush quite so triumphantly.  “Here,” Roy says, holding it out to him.

Ed takes it and then stares at it.  He probably should have done that in the opposite order.  “I—”

“Never know when you’ll need a spare,” Roy says.  “Go ahead.  Your tooth enamel will thank you later, I promise.”

“Cool,” Ed manages.  “You think it’ll write me a note?”

“Probably just a card from the drugstore,” Roy says, “but it’s the thought that counts.”  He steps back out into the hall.  “Let me get your things.”

 _Things_.  That’s a nice way of saying _Your skanky, sweaty clubbing clothes_.

“Thank you,” Ed says, staring in abjection at the shiny countertop.  “I—um.  Can I—use your toothpaste?”

“Of course,” Roy calls.

Which is—weird.  Which is very weird.  You don’t just let total strangers use your perfectly good toothpaste to scrub out their filthy mouths.  And, on the flipside, you don’t just partake in a total stranger’s toothpaste out of the blue, because that’s… got… like, tiny bits of water from their toothbrush bristles in it.  And that water probably has minute particles from their spit.  So it is, at a molecular level, _almost_ like making out.

Ed really shouldn’t be standing here contemplating extremely tenuous scientific explanations for his aversion to borrowing some of this Roy guy’s toothpaste.  He holds his breath and squeezes some onto the brush: vacillating is just going to delay their departure another minute, which makes for one more minute Roy isn’t sleeping, and one more minute—

“Hey,” he says through the foam.  “I—sorry.  Can I—could I borrow your phone to text my brother, just to stop the panic before he… before stuff happens?”

“Sure,” Roy says, sauntering back in with an extremely neat laundry bag in one hand and his phone in the other.  He holds them both out, then pauses, because Ed just paused, because Ed can’t exactly take both and then continue to brush his teeth unless he spontaneously sprouts a third arm.  Stranger things have happened, sure, but never in Ed’s _favor_.  “Ah.  Sorry.  Let me—” The bag goes on the floor, and the phone lands in Ed’s outstretched hands, and then he has to give it back for Roy to put in his passcode, and they both sort of half-laugh, and the thing that’s the _most_ awful is how much Ed likes the softness of the chagrined expression twisting up Roy’s stupid-perfect face.

He tries really, really hard not to pay too much attention to the personal details on the phone when Roy hands it over to him again, but he can’t help noticing the obvious stuff—not many apps, most of them sequestered away in little labeled folders with titles like _Work_ and _Money_ ; the lock screen photo was a little black and white shiba inu sticking its tongue out; the home screen is a picture of four soldiers in the desert, sitting on the back of a truckbed with their legs dangling.  One of them’s Roy.  One’s a tall blond dude; one’s a pretty blonde woman; and one’s a dark-haired guy in glasses.

It feels like he’s prying.  He tries not to let his eyes skim any of the content of the other text messages as he taps over to create a new one, but he does have to back-button his way out of a recent chain with somebody called _Riza_ and then an eagle emoji, so that much sticks.

He takes a deep breath—and immediately regrets it, because zero out of ten dentists recommend breathing Colgate—and then somehow manages to summon Al’s cell number from a combination of muscle memory and desperate recollection while he’s choking.  He attempts to wave away the start of what looks like concern from Roy, but he only has an elbow free to do it with, so maybe that doesn’t go so well.  He’s texting Al anyway, which is the important thing.

_Hey it’s me please read this??  A really nice guy rescued me from the club and I passed out for a little while but I’m okay and he’s gonna bring me home in a couple of minutes.  If we have something nice we can give him please get it.  I’m really sorry I disappeared and I don’t know what happened to my phone??_

That’s… 

…well, Al won’t really be surprised, which is what matters.

He hands Roy’s phone back and works something like another “Thanks” out around the toothbrush.

“Not at all,” Roy says.  He turns the screen off without even looking at it and slips the phone into the pocket of his pajama pants—like it doesn’t even matter what Ed wrote and sent on his phone, with his data.  Like it’s none of his business, and he doesn’t care, and…

And Ed fucked up the sliver of a chance he could’ve had with this while he was blackout drunk.  Of _course_ he did.  Drunk Ed is a goddamn fucking disaster, and nobody should ever let him handle _anything_ as important as trying to get with a guy like this.

Well… hell.  No rewinding; no regrets.  At least he tried.  At least it sounds like he almost, maybe got kind of close.  At least he didn’t fuck it up so badly that Roy left him at the club or kicked him all the way to the curb.  That’s almost like progress.

Ed has no idea what to do with the toothbrush once he’s finished, so he just sort of balances it sideways across the top of the little ceramic mug that has another toothbrush stuck in it.  Maybe Roy will want to disinfect it and give it to his next charity case.

They ditch the trash in a dumpster that lurks in the unreasonably damp and chilly parking garage.  Roy drives a less-than-pristine Miata.  Ed has no idea what he’s supposed to take away from that.

Ed gives him the address, and Roy says he knows the neighborhood, which makes sense when Ed remembers that he’s a _cop_.  They make it all the way to the first stoplight in blessed—if pricklingly awkward—silence before Roy says, “How much do you remember?”

Ed grimaces before he can help it.  “Not… much.  I don’t… I sorta remember that we met.  I guess.  I think we were… outside, at some point.  It was sorta cold.”

Roy’s fingers tighten around the wheel and then relax.  He has to take his right hand off of it to shift gears when the light goes green.

“Sorry,” he says.  “I’m not trying to put you on the spot.  I just… thought… I should mention that we… kissed.”

Ed’s guts drop for a whole fucking lot of reasons.  There’s some guilt in it—he doesn’t even _know_ this guy, and he must’ve known him even less at the time.

And god _damnit_ , if he’s going to do stupid, amazing shit like kissing somebody who looks like _that_ , the least he could do for himself is _remember_ it later.

“Oh,” he manages.  “At the club?”

Roy’s tongue sweeps over his lip, which really isn’t helping.  “On my doorstep.”

“Oh,” Ed says.

“I’m sorry,” Roy says.  “I should have… I was trying to be… careful, but I was—distracted, and—”

The words leap out of Ed before he can reel them back in and squash them underfoot.  “You mean _I_ started it?”

“You were a bit…” Roy’s eyes flick back and forth but never leave the road.  “…forward.”

“I was being slutty, you mean,” Ed says.  It sticks a little on the way up, but he gets it out.

“ _No_ ,” Roy says, more vehemently than Ed would have expected.  “For one thing, I think that word gets drastically misused on a regular basis.  Besides that, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying sex; and—within reason, at least—nothing wrong with communicating to other people that you do.”

Now Ed _really_ wishes that they’d fucked.

“In any case,” Roy says, a touch too quickly, “that isn’t why I… mentioned it.  I don’t—you shouldn’t—I hope you don’t feel… badly…” He’s avoiding the word _ashamed_.  Ed supposes that’s nice, although it’s also sugar-coating.  There are better methods of demonstrating niceness than mincing words, as far as Ed’s concerned.  “…about anything that happened tonight.  You weren’t—yourself.  You were forced under the influence of an extremely powerful substance, and I… took advantage.”

Ed rolls some of the gravel in his throat around until he can speak past it.  “It sounds more like _I_ took advantage of _you_.”

“You weren’t capable,” Roy says.

“Yeah?” Ed says.  “So if I rolled over in my sleep and smacked you in the face with my elbow, it wouldn’t bruise?”

Roy smiles slightly.  “That is a straw-man argument if I’ve ever heard one.”

“It is not,” Ed says.  “You can’t excuse me—” He swallows, quickly.  Tastes like Roy’s toothpaste and a pretty significant dose of unhappiness.  “—assaulting you on your own doorstep just because I was—”

“Indisposed,” Roy says.

“ _Trashed_ ,” Ed says.  “Which was my own fault.  Even if I did get—if somebody did put shit in my drink, that never would’ve happened if I’d been sober enough t—”

“Don’t,” Roy says, tightly.  “I’ve seen where victim-blaming ends, and you’re not going there on my watch.  You did _nothing_ wrong.  You are allowed and encouraged to go out on a Friday night and have fun with your friends.  You shouldn’t be responsible for taking preventative measures against someone committing a felony while you’re out enjoying your life.”

Ed can tell that this is something of a sore spot, which kind of makes sense, given that the guy’s a cop.  By the way he constructs his arguments, though, he probably should’ve been a lawyer.  Missed opportunity there.

“Fine,” Ed says.  “Then I’m—objectively sorry I did what I did while I wasn’t me.  You shouldn’t’ve had to deal with that while you were already going way the fuck out of your way to be nice to me and stuff.”

If Ed wasn’t watching so closely, and they hadn’t just passed a streetlamp, he probably wouldn’t be able to see that Roy’s working his jaw just the tiniest bit.

“I think I went about this conversation the wrong way,” Roy says.

“Probably not,” Ed says.  “I’m just a contrary asshole.  Anybody else would’ve been fine.”

He does not add _But not as fine as_ you _, am I right?_

“I’m not convinced about any of those claims,” Roy says, “but—I wasn’t looking for an apology.  I just… didn’t feel that it was right for you not to know.”

Ed opens his mouth and then forces himself to shut it before he says anything else as stupid as what he’s said before.  He swallows, which is once again a mistake, but a productive one, since it makes him think for two solid seconds before he can talk again.

“Okay,” he says.  “I think I get it now.  And I appreciate that.  Thanks.”

“Not at all,” Roy says softly.

It was good of him, really—to put all of the cards on the table like that when he didn’t have to.  Even if it is mostly just to clear his conscience, or to try to get the reality out into the open so that it’s not a secret anymore, and he can work on forgetting it, the sentiment was nice.

It’s a fucking shame, too.  All of it is.  The one part of the night that Ed would like to remember went up in smoke with all the rest of it.

Even ambushed and just being polite—or whatever his precise reaction was—Roy’s probably an amazing fucking kisser.  He’s got a really nice mouth, and even just from his sheer command of language, you can tell he knows what to do with it.  Nobody who moves with the kind of confidence and authority he does at three in the morning could be anything short of legendary when it comes to tonsil hockey, is Ed’s bet.

“Well,” Ed manages.  “I’m—sorry about the whole thing anyway.  To have put you in that… position.”  That came out sounding a whole hell of a lot dirtier than it seemed in his head.  “Spot.”  Worse.  “Um—situation.  I mean—it can’t have been much of any good, so—”

“I never said _that_ ,” Roy says.

Ed stares at him.  It’s tough to tell in the inconsistent light, but even though Roy’s eyes never leave the road, it sure as fuck looks like there’s a tiny touch of color in his cheeks.

“Oh,” Ed says.  “Um—”

“Is this the turn?” Roy says.

“Huh?” Ed says.  “Oh—yeah, that works.  If you hang a right, then you can take a left on Anderson.  This time of night, it’s not gonna make much difference.”

“Great,” Roy says, as if any single solitary goddamn thing that has happened tonight is or was or has been.

Ed supposes he should probably be grateful that giving Roy directions mostly fills the excruciating silence for the rest of the trip.

“It’s this one,” he says when their complex looms up out of the dark, the epitome of water-stained cinderblock charm.  It always bears more than a passing resemblance to a county prison in the dark.  Roy probably knows a thing or two about those, but he doesn’t say anything—just pulls up to the curb and puts the car into park.  “Hey,” Ed says.  “I… you really… you’re a really… good… guy.  Most people wouldn’t’ve done what you did—definitely not all of it.  I think, like, thirty percent would’ve been pretty amazing, honestly.  I just—it’s stupid to keep saying ‘thank you’, but it’s all I’ve got.”

“Indulge me one last thing, then,” Roy says.  He pulls the parking brake, then kills the engine—and, with it, Ed’s last hope of a moderately less-humiliating escape.  “Let me walk you up.”

Much as he’d suspected, actually hearing it gives Ed the leaky balloon feeling in his chest four times worse.  “Are you _sure_?”

“Positive,” Roy says.  He nods to the front set of doors.  “Is your brother going to have to come down and let us in?”

“Nah,” Ed says.  He reaches down and unzips his left boot so that he can wrangle out the key he safety-pinned on the inside, jammed between the side of tongue and the top of the shoe so that it wouldn’t leave an especially distinct key-shaped impression on his foot.  “This was the one thing I was smart about.”

Roy is blinking at him, but it’s too dark to determine what the precise emotion behind the increased eyelid activity is, and Ed’s just… ready for this fucking night to be over.  He has been for hours, obviously, but he’s _real_ ready now.  The adrenaline tidal wave has well and truly washed back out to sea, and he’s just sort of gasping on the beach in its wake at this point.  Time to close the book on this one and pretend he never checked it out.

He opens the car door and leads the way up.  His key to the complex front door always sticks a little, but even with his eyes sort of blurry and his skin sort of gummy and his hands sort of uncooperative with sleepiness like this, he jimmies it open without too much trouble, and then they get to enjoy a lovely ride in the extremely janky elevator.

“Question,” Roy says, looking at the ceiling, which is his first mistake.  “Has this thing ever failed before?”

“Define ‘fail’,” Ed says.

Roy winces.

“It’s gotten stuck plenty of times,” Ed says, “but I’ve never seen the cable snap and send people plummeting to their deaths or anything.”

“You’ve never seen it?” Roy says.  “Or it’s never happened?”

“I usually take the stairs,” Ed says.

“Christ,” Roy says.

“It’s okay,” Ed says.  “Obviously you’re some kinda good luck charm, or I’d probably be facedown in a gutter right now.”

Roy looks stricken.

The elevator offers up a weak, feeble little _ding_.

“Fourteenth floor,” Ed says.  “After you.”

“But I don’t know where we’re going,” Roy says, although he steps out anyway.

“Fourteen-oh-five,” Ed says.

He’s barely even touched his key to the lock with the door swings open.  There’s a split-second reprieve for him to process warm lamplight and the backlit shape of his favorite person on the planet before he has two armfuls of Al.

“Easy,” Ed manages to wheeze.  “It’s okay—Al—hey—”

“He’s alive!” Winry’s voice says from further inside.  “You owe me twenty bucks.”

“The money is meaningless,” Paninya’s voice says.  “Can I still finish my conspiracy board even if we found him?”

“Oh, jeez,” Al says, releasing Ed and straightening up very suddenly.  “You didn’t tell me he was _hot_.”

Ed blinks at Roy.  Roy blinks at Al.  Ed tries blinking at Al instead, which doesn’t much help, because Al is scowling at him.

“I at least would have changed my shirt,” Al says.

“Thank you,” Roy says.  “I… think?”

“Whoa, hold up,” Ed says, squinting in the crappy hallway lighting.  “Al, have you been—crying?”

“You can’t prove anything,” Al says.

“He cried a _lot_ ,” Winry calls.

“How dare you out me as a weepy drunk in front of the hot guy who saved Ed,” Al says.

Ed chances a look at Roy, who seems to be… forty percent bewildered and sixty percent amused.

That’s better than most people handle it.

“So when are you guys going out?” Al asks.

That’s now better than Ed is handling it.

“What?” he says.  “It’s—not—he just—he shouldn’t—”

“But he drove you over here, right?” Al asks brightly.

“It wasn’t any trouble,” Roy says.

“Will you get me my wallet?” Ed asks.  “I’ll just—”

“There’s a chance we’ve misplaced your wallet,” Al says.  Ed is positive he hasn’t, which means that this is Al’s way of not-technically-lying so that he doesn’t have to say _No_.  “Guess you’ll just have to take him out for coffee sometime.”

“What?” Ed says again, and this time he can feel the heat creeping up his face as he avoids looking over at the guy who scooped his drunk ass out of the jaws of potential peril and then enjoyed the privilege of watching him throw up several times in recompense.  “No—Al—it’s not like… he’s not obligated t—”

“That sounds lovely,” Roy says.  “Do you have a favorite coffee shop?”

“What?” Ed says.  Third time’s the charm, right?

“He does,” Al says.  “Francesca’s.  I’ll text you.  Next Saturday?”

“I think I’m working,” Roy says.  “Is Sunday all right?”

“Done,” Al says.

Ed tries a different tack.

“What,” he says, “the _fuck_?”

Al pats his arm.  “You’re welcome.”  He turns to Roy.  “Thanks for your help, hot, heroic stranger.”

The way Roy’s grinning does such terrible, awful, delicious things to the pit of Ed’s stomach that it almost lets him forget how much he abused it tonight.  “Thank _you_.”

Ed jams his finger down on the rewind button in his head.  “Did you—did you just set me up on a date while I was standing here, telling you not to set me up on a date?”

“You can’t prove that, either,” Al says.

“Just come in and get some sleep, Ed,” Winry’s voice calls.

“And come see my conspiracy board!” Paninya says.

“Goodnight, Ed,” Roy says.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Ed says.  “I think I hate all of you.  G’night.”

“So long as you’re not sure yet,” Al says, wrapping an arm around his shoulders to shepherd him inside, “I think I can live with that.”

Ed’s pretty sure that before the door shuts, he hears Roy say, “Me, too.”

The only thing he’s completely sure of, though, is that their neighbors are gonna give them _hell_ over all of this.

When he sees the fantastic pinboard detailing his possible whereabout that Paninya has somehow assembled inside of three hours, which includes color-coded ribbons and evidence of the involvement of no less than six cryptids, though, he starts to think it might be worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> I… couldn't not.
> 
>  


End file.
